Seagram Building

Seagram Building
(U.S. National Register of Historic Places)
The Seagram Building
Location:	New York, New York
Coordinates:	40°45′30.44″N, 73°58′21.94″W
Built/Founded:	1957
Architect:	Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig; Johnson, Philip
Architectural style(s):	International Style
Added to NRHP:	February 24, 2006
NRHP Reference#:	06000056 [1]
Governing body:	Private

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper in New York City, located at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd Street and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with the American Philip Johnson and was completed in 1958 . It is 156.9 meters tall with 38 stories. It stands as one of the finest examples of the functionalist aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism. It was designed as the headquarters for the Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons, thanks to the foresight of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Seagram's CEO.

Architecture

This structure, and the International Style in which it was built, had enormous influences on American architecture. One of the style's characteristic traits was to express the structure of buildings externally; a building's structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram building (and virtually all large buildings of the time) was built of a steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Mies would have preferred the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material, usually concrete; because (steel, with its low melting point, will commonly fail in fires^{[citation needed]}). Concrete hid the structure of the building — something Mies wanted to avoid at all costs — so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically, like mullions, surrounding the large glass windows. Now, observers look up and see a "fake and tinted-bronze" structure covering a real steel structure. This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice has since become commonplace. As designed, the building used 3.2 million pounds of bronze in its construction.^[2]

On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world's most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine, and marble. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme.

Another interesting aspect of the Seagram building regards the window blinds. As was common with International Style architects, Mies desired a completely uniform regularity in the appearance of the building. One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity in appearance when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions - fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

The Plaza

Ordinary by Alexander Calder, Seagram Building Plaza

The Seagram Building and Lever House, which sits just across Park Avenue, set the architectural style for skyscrapers in New York for several decades. It appears as a simple bronze box, set back from Park Avenue by a large, open granite plaza. Mies did not intend the open space in front of the building to become a gathering area, but it developed as such, and became very popular as a result. In 1961, when New York City enacted a major revision to its 1916 Zoning Resolution, which was the nation's first comprehensive Zoning Resolution, it offered incentives for developers to install "privately owned public spaces" which were meant to emulate that of the Seagram's Building; the following 40 years of development in Manhattan did so with relatively little success.

The Four Seasons

Main article: The Four Seasons Restaurant

The building is the location of The Four Seasons Restaurant, also designed by Mies van der Rohe and Johnson. Its interiors have been maintained as they were when it opened in 1959. The artist Mark Rothko was famously engaged to paint a series of works for the restaurant in 1958. Accepting the commission, he secretly resolved to create "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room". Observing the restaurant's pretentious atmosphere upon his return from a trip to Europe, Rothko abandoned the project altogether, returned his advance and kept the paintings for himself. The final series was dispersed and now hangs in three locations: London’s Tate Gallery, Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..

References in Popular Culture

In the first episode of 1960s television series That Girl, Ann Marie works at the magazine stand in the lobby, which is also the location of the offices of Newsview Magazine, where her boyfriend Don Hollinger works. The opening credits of the first season show Ann walking north on Park Avenue and walking into the building.

The building and fountain form a backdrop to a scene in the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961) starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard.

In Company, a Stephen Sondheim musical, the protagonist, Bobby, is compared to the building.

Novelist James Phelan places his fictional Global Syndicate of Reporters (GSR) headquarters in the building. Phelan, once an architecture student at RMIT, cites Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson as two of his favourite designers. Several scenes of the second Lachlan Fox thriller, PATRIOT ACT, are set in The Four Seasons Restaurant.

Trivia

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

The Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom was constructed as a half-scale copy of the building.

External links

• Architectural history and description
• Capsule descriptive quotes
• Herbert Muschamp's encomium
• The Four Seasons Restaurant

Sources

• Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. Bantam Books, 1981.

References

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