Wrought Iron Gates and Balustrades
About 1901
Before you step through the main door, look at the door itself. The entrances are closed by tall gates of wrought iron, with panels of curling tendrils and stylised flowers topped by a fan-shaped grille, and the same vocabulary of scrolls and leaves runs through the whole building: the balcony railings on the facade, the balustrades around the atrium, the frame of the skylight, even the lamp brackets. In an age before security cameras, iron was how a bank showed that it was both open to the public and impossible to break into.
The work is of high quality. The bars are hand forged, not cast, and you can see the hammer marks and the way the tendrils are split and curled from a single bar. The gilded rosettes at the centre of the balcony panels catch the light from the skylight, and on the facade gates the monogram of the bank is worked into the design. Much of the decorative ironwork of this period in São Paulo was imported from Europe or made by immigrant smiths, and the style, with its whiplash curves, belongs to the Art Nouveau that was reaching Brazil from France and Belgium at exactly this time.
Look at the gates from inside as well as outside. Against the daylight they read as black lace, and from the street at night, when the atrium is lit, they frame the glowing interior. The restoration in the late nineteen nineties stripped decades of paint and repaired damaged sections, and the CCBB now points visitors toward the ironwork in its own heritage tours, called Jornada Patrimonial, which explain the building floor by floor. If you take one, this is where the guide will start.
Did You Know? Much of the decorative ironwork of coffee-boom São Paulo was shipped from Europe in pieces and assembled on site by immigrant blacksmiths.
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