Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

When Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company opened a branch location in 1954 at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan, it ushered in a bold new era of bank architecture. While other financial institutions had started to peel back the industry’s heavy masonry walls, the design by SOM dematerialized them. Its transparent façades, vast luminous ceilings, and street-level vault opened up a long cloistered world.

Nearly sixty years later, SOM revisited its own design, mining the firm’s archives for guidance as it reimagined the retail bank as a retail store. Guided by their predecessors’ original design intentions, the architects preserved or restored primary design elements, establishing an architectural integrity that can accommodate changing tenancies while incorporating new requirements of the adaptive reuse. The renovation reestablishes the building’s prominent place among the city’s architectural landmarks and helps reactivate an underutilized stretch of Midtown Manhattan’s main street.