Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Image 2 of 29Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Table, Chair, GlassCooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Facade, WindowsCooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Glass, Windows, HandrailCooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - More Images+ 24

Text description provided by the architects. A cascade of chains on the facade, dynamic space, mobile, changing, not what you would expect from a bank, especially in a province at the foot of the Maritime Alps. The branch of this Credit Agency, winner of a closed competition, brings a breath of lightness and a levity that would be more common in a completely different sort of building; an exhibition centre or a performance venue, for example.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Image 11 of 29
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

This bank is stripped of that entire traditional image which characterises an institution of this type and instead presents a new unedited image of itself.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Facade, Windows
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

Surprising and innovative outside, intimate and welcoming inside.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Facade
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

Although made up mainly of young people, the Kuadra studio of architects knows how to obtain the very best from the materials they use with rigor and finesse. Glass, metal and stainless steel are all combined in a clever alchemy that highlights consistency, form, quality and singularity, while never neglecting composition, which remains precise and clean.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Facade, Windows
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

The best way to fulfill the needs of the future customers and employees are constantly taken into consideration during the process of the project.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Facade, Glass
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

Strips of light, transparent staircases and pathways at different levels mean that clients in this bank will not be limited to cueing at the teller’s counter. They will have an opportunity to experience an architectural quality that Le Corbusier christened Architectural Promenade.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Stairs, Handrail
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

The architecture seems like an ode to clarity, transparency, to conceptual essence itself, while at the same time never losing sight of that direct functional relationship with the public, not just words from a bank worker’s manual, but the real public; an old man, a parent a child, all with differing needs. There is a wide, luminous open informal space given over to a children’s’ play area, quite a novelty in a bank, besides the obligatory comfortable sofas at the entrance. Wherever one goes from the counters to the meeting rooms one is breathing in that atmosphere of ordinary domesticity that never descends into the banal or predictable.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Image 26 of 29
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

The inclusion of the chains on the façade, 11 linear kilometres, are no mere stylistic or aesthetic pretence, no external second skin. The idea is much more considered. The whole building, changes, shimmers and modifies its physical consistency. The curtain of chains hanging from on high fluctuates lightly letting off a gentle ringing, like Tibetan prayer bells. It captures the light bringing it inside, moulding it, and changing it, thus transforming the massive potentially heavy interior so that the whole building becomes a gigantic semitransparent lamp. In direct sunlight they act as protective sunshades.

Functionality and poetry combined naturally, without being pretentious. The result is surprising.

Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra - Table, Chair, Glass
©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

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Project location

Address:12045 Fossano, Province of Cuneo, Italy

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Location to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.
About this office
Cite: "Cooperative Credit Bank / Studio Kuadra" 13 Sep 2010. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/76886/cooperative-credit-bank-studio-kuadra> ISSN 0719-8884

©  Courtesy of Studio Kuadra

合作信用银行 / Studio Kuadra

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