City National Bank opened its Palm Springs branch in 1959 in a modernist building designed by Rudi Baumfeld of Victor Gruen Associates. The commission brought one of postwar America's most influential commercial architecture firms to the desert, placing Palm Springs within the orbit of national corporate practice rather than purely regional work. The building joined the downtown bank district taking shape along Palm Canyon Drive in the late 1950s.
The design displays the crisp corporate detailing characteristic of Gruen Associates' commercial work, with the building frequently cited locally for its screen and canopy treatment. Baumfeld, a Viennese émigré and partner in the firm, brought the same European modernist sensibility that his fellow Austrians Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler had transplanted to Southern California a generation earlier.
