Federal Reserve Bank Building
- Architect
- George W. Kelham
- Year
- 1924
- Style
- Neoclassical
- City
- San Francisco, CA
Completed in 1924 at 400 Sansome Street, this building served as the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's headquarters for nearly sixty years. George W. Kelham designed it with a ground-floor Ionic colonnade in pure Beaux-Arts style topped by an upper building in the newer Moderne fashion of the mid-1920s. The Fed moved to larger quarters at 101 Market Street in 1983, and the building, now known as the Bently Reserve, was sold to private developers.
the building
Ionic colonnade. The building pairs a Beaux-Arts Ionic colonnade at street level with an upper mass built in the Moderne idiom then emerging in 1924, a hybrid that marks the transition between two design languages in a single facade.
Guerin's mural. Inside the banking lobby at the Sansome Street entrance is a mural by Jules Guerin, the artist who had created the color palette for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
the style
The building's Neoclassical character comes through most clearly in its Beaux-Arts Ionic colonnade, a stately vocabulary chosen to project the institutional authority of a Federal Reserve headquarters.
More on Neoclassicalthe architect
George W. Kelham was a prominent San Francisco architect responsible for the Federal Reserve Bank Building's Beaux-Arts and Moderne composition, completed in 1924.
significance
The Old Federal Reserve Bank Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. After law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe left in 2002, the building, now called the Bently Reserve, has continued as private office space, with its Banking Hall and board rooms booked for events.
nearby
- Italian American Bank
- Bank of Italy Building
- Transamerica Pyramid
- Merchants Exchange Building
- Colombo Building
- Fugazi Bank Building