I have lived in Lugano for the past forty years, but the only public commission the city has ever entrusted to me was a bus stop,” Mario Botta humorously confesses. This is despite the fact that this native of Switzerland, born in Mendrisio on April 1st, 1943, is the first Swiss architect of international renown since Le Corbusier. Thus, it’s no surprise that he describes Switzerland as both “a mother and a wicked stepmother.” He has built cathedrals, synagogues, towers, and modern-art museums all over the world, yet his hometown has only ever commissioned him for a bus stop.
While Milanese writer Luca Doninelli called that very original creation—with lighting that changes according to the season—“the new cathedral of Lugano”, it’s a seemingly weightless structure, counterbalancing in a way the architect’s bulkier private commissions in the Swiss canton of Ticino. Take, for example, the bid he won in the early 1980s for the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano. At age 46, the architect would erect what he called a “mature structure,” his first major urban work, located in Switzerland’s third largest financial center. It has since become an international icon of bank architecture.
On the site of the bank had previously stood three turn-of-the-century villas and a parking garage, all buildings familiar to Botta since his childhood. Yet, tearing them down would not ultimately result in the destruction of his childhood memories. “I didn’t want to do what most people were proposing, which was to erect a single, large building. We divided the site into four smaller buildings offset from each other by empty space to give it a dynamic look from the street. Each building has an identity of its own, a face that symbolizes the stratified memory of the city built up over time. While the bank is a new building, it’s rooted in the layering of history.” These words reflect the seminal influence of Louis Kahn, one of Botta’s heroes and a former collaborator in Venice at the very beginning of Botta’s career.
The bank’s four facades are a take on the castle towers one finds in the nearby city of Como and, as such, when it opened in November 1988, the building’s Mediterranean grandeur earned it the nickname “Palazzo Botta.” Its precious architectural poetry derives from its two shades of natural stone, gray cement and pink granite, a flourish that was anathema to bank architecture at the time with its rationally designed buildings and impersonal—empty—glass facades.
“The glass-and-metal banks of the ‘70s and ‘80s, influenced by international style, have all aged a bit poorly, as today we only see them as buildings from the ‘70s without any identity of their own.
In contrast, banks from the beginning of the century are archetypal Greek Doric temples and call to mind historical monuments.” Perhaps the most vividly iconic example of this style is to be found on Wall Street and in the Financial District of New York City. Banking helped define Botta’s generation and it deserves a new interpretation: gone are the days of anonymous offices bustling with employees; rather, banks should stand out boldly in the urban landscape, similar to the post office or city hall. Botta goes even further in his definition of the true identity of a bank: “We thought banks had to have sex appeal.” Though now owned by EFG International, the bank is Switzerland’s fifth-largest private bank, and the interior still exudes Botta’s great ambition. The sacred aura of the place is undeniable, which is no wonder since the architect has built iconic chapels through the Ticino region. Yet he refrains from drawing a hasty parallel between banking and religion. “There is no direct link between the two, as they have such different functions, but there is a metaphorical link. In this bank, there is zenithal light, which you find in churches. It’s a way to gild surfaces and truly generate space.”
"We are the very first press outlet to be given permission to photograph it. This is twenty-seven meters below lake level”
Here, works of art are not in the bank’s vaults but on its walls, exhibited in its hallways. It is a kind of Guggenheim of the Swiss avant-garde, active from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.
The bank owns nearly one thousand of these marvels of Swiss nouvel art, but the high point of our guided tour, led by bank historian Francesca Martinoli, awaits us in the third basement of the building, in the vault room. We are the very first press outlet to be given permission to photograph it. “This is twenty-seven meters below lake level,” Martinoli whispers to us. “The room is water safe to withstand up to two tons of pressure.” It’s one of the most beautiful vaults in the world; no vault of Swiss accounts before it has ever exuded such glamor. And, here again, the faithful might almost smell incense, as it was designed as a kind of crypt. Botta concludes the visit to his dulcet palace with: “It is a mysterious place that called for a kind of sacred feeling given its precious, secret contents. Deposits disappear and become mirrors in which we each find our own identity, as if looking into an immense, golden sky full of hope.”
