Ludo Groen's book Mountains of Gold investigates the historical link between Swiss banking and the Alpine landscape. It goes beyond Zurich to show how, during the war, gold was stored in bunkers and mountain routes, using the national redoubt strategy. Afterwards, banks leveraged this connection with the mountains to build international trust. Groen, an architect, approaches the topic from a spatial perspective.
Hidden Infrastructure and Risk Management in the Landscape 🏔️
The research reveals a logistics and security engineering based on the territory. It's not just about safes in cities, but a transport and storage network integrated into the Alps. This system leveraged topography for concealment and defense, creating critical infrastructure outside urban centers. The study faced the difficulty of accessing private archives, reflecting how this technical layer remained opaque.
The Most Literal Fixed-Term Deposit in History 💰
When a bank tells you your money is safe as a rock, perhaps they're not joking. It turns out the Swiss trust model was literalized by burying assets in actual mountains. An unbeatable branding strategy: you can't have a more solid image than a granite mountain. Of course, the exploitation of territory and labor to build that myth was the part the advertising carefully omitted.