Garantia Bank Building

Brief information

Garantiya Bank looks like a building that deliberately refused to be a stern banking box. It was built in 1993-1995 on Malaya Pokrovskaya Street, among small pre-revolutionary mansions, so the architects divided the volume into two parts: the building seems to adapt to the old street while at the same time arguing with it through vivid forms.

The authors linked the new bank with the Nizhny Novgorod banks of the early 20th century, but they did so without copying them. Free Art Nouveau forms, ceramics, and fairy-tale motifs appeared on the facades. Because of this combination, the building became one of the notable examples of the Nizhny Novgorod architectural school of the 1990s; for the project, the architects received the State Prize of Russia in 1996.

What to notice first

It is worth comparing the main and side facades: the first is built around flowing lines and a decorative portal, while the second is described as more restrained and geometric. This helps reveal the building's main device: it combines historical allusions, Art Nouveau, and the experience of modernism without reducing them to a single manner.

The portal reads as the “keyhole” of a symbolic little chest, and next to it the round towers widen toward the top. The right tower rises above the cornice and links the ceremonial facade with the side one. Ceramic panels with firebirds and small medallions on the walls are important not as decoration “for beauty”: they directly continue the idea of the bank-as-chest and connect the facade with the decorative tradition of the State Bank on Bolshaya Pokrovskaya Street.