Dick Stanley Request

The Dick Stanley Request began with an email I received on March 1, 2015, at 7:01 PM. The sender, Mr. Dick Stanley, had mistaken me—Jamie Diamond, a female artist—for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In his message, he explained that he had been a loyal Chase customer in Columbus, Ohio, since 1996 but had recently relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he was frustrated to find no local Chase branches. “I know how busy you must be,” he wrote, “but if you find the time, please let me know.”

 

Intrigued by the sincerity of the request, I travelled to Albuquerque to explore potential sites of development and for over a year collaborated with six prominent architects to design site-specific conceptual branches of the future.  Collapsing the roles of artist, architect, and CEO, the project continues my ongoing investigation into constructed identities, the performance of power, and the fragile boundary between truth and fiction.

 

Following the catastrophic failures of the banking system in 1929, public faith was all but lost. In an attempt to regain that trust, the system engaged with a new progressive architectural iconography to project its aesthetic and material transformation to the public. Confidence was re-established using a new open, efficient architectural reality that embraced new nontraditional vocabularies. Now, amidst the fall out of the Great Recession and the dawn of the great Crypto Metaversal revolution, banking is once again in a state of transition. What role, if any, does the bank branch still play? Are we imagining a new architectural model for the future of finance—or simply building monuments to obsolescence?