The one exception to Hildreth Meière’s characteristic figurative designs can be seen in the abstract, Art Deco-style Banking Room at One Wall Street, where the Irving Trust Company asked Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker to provide “an inviting and friendly” reception area for their clients. Perry Coke Smith, a design assistant at the firm, created an abstract pattern for the walls and ceiling to be executed in glass mosaic. Meière was hired to provide scale and gradations of color for the faceted design. She and her assistant, Lynn Fausett, painted a range of colors first onto three-inch scale and later onto full-scale photostats of the angular design. Her warm colors shift from a deep oxblood at the floor to orange with gold higher on the walls, to gold with orange on the ceiling. The gold-leafed tesserae forming the jagged lines of the abstract pattern get closer as they rise. Meière’s gradations are so subtle that it appears as if the torcheres in the room were responsible for the gradually changing hues from dark to light. Meière’s colorful design was fabricated in large tesserae, or pieces of glass mosaic, by Pühl & Wagner in Berlin and shipped to New York to be installed by their American affiliate, Ravenna Mosaics. The same firm had recently installed Meière’s designs at St. Bartholomew’s Church and Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. The irregular shape of the room makes it difficult to see a repeat in the abstract design, but the patterns are actually repeated on opposite walls. Equally difficult to find are the letters and numbers A1 to H3, with which segments of the design are coded to correspond with the cartoons for each wall section. The striking Banking Room demonstrates how even without allegorical or religious imagery, Meière was able to combine color and scale imaginatively to create an extraordinary Art Deco space.
In addition to providing color and scale for the Banking Room at One Wall Street, Meière was asked to design a ceiling for the lobby. Meière herself developed the iconography. The theme that she chose was The Pursuit of Wealth. Meière explained the appropriateness of her subject:
Standing as this building does in the heart of the “Financial District,” and at the head of the street whose name throughout the world is the symbol of money-power, it seemed appropriate to express in the ceiling of its main entrance some allegory of the pursuit of wealth.[1]
Her iconography started at the Broadway entrance to the building:
...the Pursuit of Money symbolizes that evolution into Beauty which money can have. In the extreme south east corner of the ceiling is a human figure, which typifies the soul of Man, reaching up from the Materiality of Worldly Possessions to the beauty that money can purchase, reaching up to the three winged figures which represent the Need of Beauty which is in all men, who in turn, with upraised faces and features all can understand, sweep on to Beauty itself, symbolized by the flower forms in the northwest corner.[2]
Meière found the space itself a challenge:
The walls were of black marble and the ceiling was the reflecting surface for the light. The design, therefore, could not be heavy either in mass or in color, or the effect would be too dark. Many experiments with silver leaf were made, and the incidental veils of color were blown on with an air brush.[3]
As she had for her designs at the Nebraska State Capitol and Radio City Music Hall, Meière sent her studies for the lobby ceiling to her old mentor Hartley Burr Alexander for his comments. Meière explained to Alexander that the architect had insisted upon movement in the design. Her challenge was to create a figurative design that would read well from different directions. She further explained to Alexander the problem of combining abstraction with figures and how she solved it by turning to artist Kimon Nicolaides.
