Farewell to stock exchanges — fire is not their only enemy

There was something horribly fantastical about the flames that engulfed the quartet of dragons, their tails twisted into a narwhal’s tusk of a spire in Copenhagen this week, an almost Viking vision. Even if trading moved out in 1974, the damage to a wonderful and strange building can’t help but look symbolic.

History has been a little careless with its financial landmarks. A few years before the Copenhagen stock exchange was built (in a deliberately Dutch manner), Amsterdam’s Dutch East India Company built its own, the first recognisably modern stock exchange, in 1611. It bridged the Amstel, and in 1622 the Spanish attempted to blow it up by rowing a boat full of gunpowder beneath it. It always, however, suffered structural problems and was demolished in the 19th century. London’s first exchange, dating from 1566 and based on a similar arcaded courtyard model, lasted exactly a century before it succumbed to the Great Fire.   

Also lost was the monumental Chicago Stock Exchange. Built by Louis Sullivan (effective inventor of the skyscraper) and Dankmar Adler in 1893, this heavily ornamented landmark was a symbol of the city’s status as the world’s fastest growing metropolis. But in 1972 it was demolished to make way, slightly ironically, for a skyscraper. Its original trading floor is now in the quiet confines of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Paris Bourse de Commerce (1811) survived years of dereliction and has been reborn as a museum, its impressive rotunda housing Francois Pinault’s art collection. That building inspired London’s rotunda in the form of the Coal Exchange (1849), demolished to accommodate a road-widening scheme in 1962. The scandal was pivotal to the genesis of the conservation movement. Its iron dragons survive as the models for the City’s boundary markers. Vienna’s old stock exchange (1877) now accommodates a glamorous concert venue, perfect for the city and an intriguing reflection on acoustics.

These exchanges were once raucous places where sound ebbed and flowed through the day. When the London Stock Exchange planned a move into a purpose-built tower in the 1970s, the new trading floor was found to be too quiet, its finishes absorbing the noise. With London’s position in decline compared with New York and other markets, the City feared it would lose its sense of spectacle and boisterous tradition. The architects introduced harder materials to increase the volume. Even so, within a few years of its opening in 1979, the floors went quiet as deregulation and electronic dealing replaced open outcry. The trading floor today is a relic, more at home, like Chicago’s, in a museum than a financial centre.  

The increasingly intangible nature of trading in the digital age presents a problem for architecture. A courtyard full of gossip and trade, as seen in the now-blackened building in Copenhagen or the besuited scrum of Capel Court in London, presented a spectacle of business as show business. Now every office worker is glued to a screen. Traders just have more of them. They do not need their own architecture — or sometimes even offices. The spatial nature of exchange has shrunk to the terminal and an office chair or, with high frequency and algorithmic trading, not even that, only proximity to a cable.

New York has somehow clung on to its familiar trading floors, derived from its early courtyards such as those in Amsterdam, London and Copenhagen. But real estate speculation has brought super-luxe residential developments such as One Wall Street. There often seem to be more journalists and TV crews than traders on the floor — a representation of trading. The best of the buildings of finance should be able to survive, perhaps as pubs or hotels (such as London’s The Ned), but the old model is gone. Copenhagen’s fire may be symbolic as well as catastrophic.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s design and architecture critic

Letter in response to this column:

A stockbroker’s nostalgia for a world before Big Bang / From Paul Fellerman, London NW7, UK