Form, function, and finance: architecture and finance theory [An article from: Critical Perspectives on Accounting]

This digital document is a journal article from Critical Perspectives on Accounting, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
At least at first glance, a bank's customers ought to be concerned with only one thing-the price they must pay for the services they receive. Architecture beyond the merely functional ought to have no role, especially not in the modern global economy in which increasingly automated financial intermediation of all sorts appears to be approaching the ideals of pure competition and perfect efficiency. Even in these financially sophisticated times, however, symbols matter, and the message communicated by these symbols is one which cannot be communicated in any other way. It is necessary for a financial institution, and perhaps even the financial system itself, to have a strong visual presence. There is a visceral appeal of an architecturally distinguished building to the senses that speaks to us in a way that the cerebral appeal of pure information cannot.