[Image: Chicago Board of Trade trading floor, via wikipedia /Artwork: designslinger]

We are being inundated with images of frantic traders on the floors of stock exchanges around
the world, trying to come to grips with the collapse of the financial markets. While many people may be losing lots of money, I was intrigued by the trading rooms themselves; their function, history and their relevance in the global economy.

The first stock exchanges in the United States were simple affairs. A group of men, brokers, got
together and traded securities and options, often in the open air. The New York Stock Exchange for instance, was started by men who traded near a fence under a tree. They eventually formalized their association by signing the Buttonwood Agreement, which was the name of the species of said tree, and eventually decided to move their transactions to a more hospitable indoor environment.

[Images: New York Stock Exchange trading floor, bbc.co.uk, abc.net.au /Artwork: designslinger]

Once they came indoors, the businessmen required a large open space where they could call
out their their trades in an "open cry." A tally board of some sort was needed to keep track of all the buying and selling taking place, and the trading floor was born. The area could be a simple local community hall, or an elaborate affair of stone and marble with soaring ceilings and the latest technology. The NYSE moved into their current home in 1903, designed by architect George Post, and constructed for the association because it out grew its old out-of-date place of operation. Although the vast expanse is barely recognizable today with all the electronic equipment crammed into every corner, it is still the same amphitheater the trader's occupied 105 years ago. However, change is in the air, computers and electronic trading have rendered the days of screaming out trades from the floor obsolete.

[Images: Bourse Palais Brongniart trading floor, culture.gouv.fr, gregj.9online.fr /Artwork: designslinger]

When Napoleon decided the French stock exchange needed a building worthy of his empire,
he enlisted architect Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart to design a building to house the Paris-based exchange. He began the design of the Bourse in 1807, and although he died in 1813, the building that opened in 1825 was completed as he had orginally planned. The Palais Brongniart is much more effusive with classical inspiration than its New York counterpart and is unrestrained in celebrating the last gasp of Napoleonic patronage. While the New York floor is still in operation, the Bourse traders switched from the open cry system and now trade electronically with the fully automated CAC (Cotation Aissistee en Continu). So the old exchange has morphed from a financial marketplace into an elegant conference center.

[Images: Chicago trader's, memory.loc.gov; Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room, Art Institute of Chicago,
daseindesign via flickr /Artwork: designslinger]

In 1894, a 13-storey office building designed by the team of Adler and Sullivan, opened on
La Salle Street in Chicago. The new home of the Chicago Stock Exchange would stand at that location until a wrecker's ball smashed through the brick facade in 1972. It is one of the more remarkable stories of a trading floor that outlived its usefulness. In the early years of the preservation movement in this country, demolition of buildings like the Exchange galvanized communities into action. Before the building came down, the trading room was meticulously disassembled, packed, and put into storage while work progressed on a new which would reconstructed in a new wing at the Art Institute of Chicago. The old room was reassembled in an area of the new building that was created specifically for it, and opened to the public in 1977. A space that was once the sole domain of businessmen would now be shared with the general public. While it is missing the crush of bodies screaming and yelling with hands and arms flying, it is the one room where only the architecture reigns supreme.

An update on the Farnsworth House:
We posted on the flooding of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House the other day and received an email from Caroline Barker at the National Trust in Washington D.C., with a link to the Trust's blog for an update on what's happening out there in Plano, Illinois. The link includes a few pictures showing the condition of the house as the flood waters have receded - so please take a look at: blogs.nationaltrust.org. Thanks Caroline, for the link!