Architecture
The structure is a heavy Italianate palazzo built on gargantuan scale - it occupies a full city block. The exterior of the building is made of gray granite. Walls, cornices, columns are richly decorated with northern art nouveau inspired sculptures and bas-reliefs by two notable period sculptors Vasily Kozlov (Vassili, Василий Васильевич Козлов) and Leopold Dietrich (Леопольд Августович Дитрих). After 1917 Kozlov and Dietrich became official Soviet sculptors of the social realism persuasion. Many contemporaries considered the building too American, too tasteless, and its appearance generated some heated public debate. At the corner of Malaia Morskaia and Nevsky is an entrance to the actual bank, now housing a collection of travel agencies, from 1960 until 1992 the building was Leningrad headquarters of Aeroflot, the space is airy, quiet with entrance passage leading through a hall to the cavernous bank lobby, complete with rows of columns and a spacious gallery above. Wawelberg Bank is one of most remarkable turn of the 20th century bank buildings in St. Petersburg. The exterior of the building bears HW - Hyppolite Wawelberg - initials set in an arrangement resembling a coat of arms.
Read more about this topic: Wawelberg Bank Building
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)