ARBED Building

For most of the twentieth century Luxembourg was a steel country, and this was the steel company's house. ARBED — the Aciéries Réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange — came out of the First World War strong, having bought up German-owned plants that had to be sold after the defeat, and decided at once that its head office should look the part. It chose this spot on the axis between the Adolphe Bridge and the station, hired the French architect René Théry, and had Sosthène Weis, the state architect who was also the city's best-loved watercolourist, oversee the work. Théry died in 1922; Weis finished it alone, and the building opened on the 9th of December that year.

It is a French château of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reimagined in steel and reinforced concrete and faced in sandstone, with fifteen thousand square metres inside. When it opened it had salons, smoking rooms, a library, a ceremonial hall, a restaurant, a bowling alley and a gymnasium — a company that ran the country's economy could afford to run its staff's leisure too. Look up at the main entrance: Victory crowning Mercury, god of trade, with Science looking on, coins and a cogwheel at their feet, and little putti carrying a copper globe, for a firm that sold its steel to the world.

The world changed. ARBED merged into Arcelor in 2002 and into ArcelorMittal in 2006, and in 2012 the world's biggest steelmaker announced it would leave the building, which cost too much to keep. There was talk of a library, a museum, a hotel; the state said it had no money to buy it. In 2014 the Spuerkeess, the state savings bank from across the square, bought it instead, and after eighteen months of restoration it reopened in 2016 as a bank. "Much like Luxembourg's economy moved from steel to finance," one commentator wrote, "so has this iconic building."