The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

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  Instead of the city’s preventing the internal traffic flood at the place where it originates, traffic engineers wait till traffic has reached the flood crest and then build ditches and canals to carry it away. These ditches merely add to the congestion, since traffic, unlike rivers, flows in two directions, and the wider the new exit route, the more traffic flows into it. All the current plans for dealing with congestion are based on the assumption that it is a matter of highway engineering, not of comprehensive city and regional planning, and that the private motorcar has priority over every other means of transportation, no matter how expensive it is in comparison with public transportation, or how devastating its by-products. In most cities, current plans for “traffic relief” include adding central parking areas, often tunnelling under public squares and parks, as in San Francisco’s Union Square Park, or of building handsome garages, like the one Philadelphia’s special commission has lately opened on Rittenhouse Square, but all these devices merely invite more traffic. Our Park Commissioner, Mr. Robert Moses, has happily resisted this kind of encroachment on our own parks, but he is convinced that more garages should be built in the core of congested areas or just outside them. And only the other day Mr. T. T. Wiley, our Traffic Commissioner, put forth a proposal to provide room for forty thousand cars in public parking lots and garages, mostly at the edge of the city—as if this invitation to fill the highways coming into New York would magically take a load off the streets within the city. Proposals for off-street parking space in new office buildings continue to pop up, too, and the practice of providing at least enough parking space for the higher executives is fast becoming standard practice. One of the latest suggestions, by a firm of local architects, offers a slight variant on Mr. Moses’ scheme—a series of huge garages, up to six hundred feet long and seven floors tall, astride the city’s river drives. This scheme, too, would halt many incoming cars at the edges of Manhattan, but it suggests no means for enabling the dismounted motorist to reach his urban destination by swift public transport. Even if it did, it would still have the common failing of traffic schemes—it would encourage more vehicles on overburdened arteries. People, it seems, find it hard to believe that the cure for congestion is not more facilities for congestion.

  While only a quack would pretend to have a pat solution for this complicated problem, there is no reason that we should not explore alternatives to the course we have been so blindly following. As Mr. Robert Mitchell, one of our few intelligent traffic experts, lately remarked, when a municipal counsellor in Philadelphia expressed shock at the modesty of the budget he proposed for further research, “What we need is not more traffic counts but more thought—and thinking is cheap.” A little thought may disclose that with traffic, as with many other matters, there is no swift and simple answer—“the longest way round is the shortest way home.” Before we can promise to restore the normal facilities of transportation to our blocked avenues and our almost paralyzed metropolis we may have to take even more drastic measures than rerouting the continental flow of wheat. Most of these measures, happily, will increase the habitability of the city and relieve the almost neurotic compulsion to get out of it. But one cannot promise that this public gain will produce a private profit.

  SEPTEMBER 13, 1958 (ON THE SEAGRAM BUILDING)

  HERE IS A quick but accurate way of describing the new skyscraper office building at 375 Park Avenue. It is everything that most of the office buildings that have been going up in the midtown area in the last few years are not. That the new work gains by this contrast is, happily, the least that can be said in its favor. Almost any piece of sober craftsmanship, however humble its pretensions, would gain by such contrasting, and Seagram’s new building, far from being humble, is perhaps the most quietly ostentatious one in the city. But to appreciate the virtues of this building, sheathed in bronze and topaz-tinted glass, one should make a summary canvass of its contemporaries—one can hardly call them its rivals. Among them are greedy buildings, hogging every cubic foot of space the law allows; flashy buildings, with murals in the lobby whose winking leer at art has something less than honorable intentions; gaudy buildings, whose unpleasant colors resemble Detroit’s recent favorite hues and in a few years will look similarly old-fashioned; buildings slickly covered with sheets of pressed metal, which are cheaper than stone or brick and which, despite all the decorative embossments, look just that—magnificently cheap; and corner-cutting buildings, often with ceilings so low that their claims to being adequately air-conditioned must be considered brazen effrontery, as their inmates have doubtless been discovering.

  Out of this stalled, rush-hour clutter of new structures, brightly sordid, meretriciously up-to-date, the Seagram building has emerged like a Rolls-Royce accompanied by a motorcycle escort that gives it space and speed. To an even greater degree than its elegant neighbor, Lever House, 375 has ambiance. From three sides, it is wholly visible to the eye and approachable by foot; instead of using up space, it creates space. This act of detachment from the surrounding buildings was the most daring of all the innovations its chief architectural designer, Mies van der Rohe, made; by a heavy sacrifice of profitable floor area he achieved for this single structure an effect that usually is created only when a group of buildings are placed together on a plat even larger than a city block, as in Rockefeller Center. Some of that openness will disappear when the vacant block to the north is occupied, but some of it will remain, as in the case of its modest traditional neighbor, St. Bartholomew’s Church, a block below on Park Avenue.

  In accounting for the qualities that distinguish this edifice, one is safe in assuming that they derive, directly or indirectly, from the Master himself. To acknowledge this is not to diminish the contribution made by his associate, Philip Johnson, an avowed if by now an independent disciple, nor does it minimize the necessary donation of practical architectural experience made by those veterans in office-building design, Kahn & Jacobs. The spirit that pervades the building as a whole, the spirit that makes it a whole, is that of Mies van der Rohe; it has the aesthetic impact that only a unified work of art carried through without paltry compromises can have. In their willingness to accept van der Rohe’s judgment, rather than that of their realty experts, the Seagram executives deserve, in the cause of art, a special salute.

  The Seagram building—which, landscaping and all, occupies an entire blockfront on Park Avenue and half the land between that street and Lexington Avenue—presents itself, first of all, as a single shaft of bronze and glass, thirty-eight stories high (set well back from both Park Avenue and the side streets), roughly a hundred and fifty feet wide and less than ninety feet deep, with five-story wings at either side, and, in the rear, a narrower ten-story wing, which is not visible from the Park Avenue front. Now, when other contemporary architects are still, thirty years later, imitating Mendelsohn’s innovation of unbroken horizontal bands of wall and window or van der Rohe’s all-glass façade boxed by steel, van der Rohe himself has gone back to Louis Sullivan’s concept of the skyscraper as a “proud and soaring thing” and has designed one with unqualified emphasis on the vertical. The prototype of this building was van der Rohe’s own project, nearly forty years old, for a glass skyscraper, but, apart from that, this tower is such a divergence from the mode of his Farnsworth house, his Illinois Institute of Technology, and his Lake Shore apartment houses that it must give all the little micelike Mieses who have been coming forth from the architectural schools a touch of panic, for this is not the particular academic cliché they have so sedulously identified with modern architecture. To make the departure even more unmodish, van der Rohe has also rejected the now standard thin, slab-shaped building, with its long sides acting as a wall that blocks off the vision of the beholder, and with its shallow layout offering a suggestion of openness that becomes insincere once sealed windows, air-conditioning, and day-long indoor lighting have been installed. In the development of van der Rohe, the Seagram building is almost as much of
a departure for him as the chapel at Ronchamp was for Le Corbusier, but, unlike Ronchamp, the new building reveals no sloppy abandonment of discipline.

  The upward movement of the unbroken central prism is accentuated by the use of narrow, vertical bronze fins, or mullions, not only to separate all the windows, which run from floor to ceiling, but to multiply the vertical lines that rise above the glass-walled ground floor right to the roof; even the bronze plates of the great columns that frame the Park Avenue entrance are incised with vertical lines. This sheathing is in direct contrast to the underlying structure, whose powerful frame, when bare, gave more visual weight to the horizontal beams than to the vertical columns. The windows are set in bays almost thirty feet wide between heavy columns, six windows to a bay, and the faces of the building, instead of being an expression of the structure, are frankly and boldly a mask, designed to give pleasure to the eye and to complement, rather than to reveal, the coarser structural form behind it. This is, after all, a logical treatment of the curtain wall, for the very nature of a curtain is to be detached from the structure, not to support it; if anyone should doubt this detachment, the barely visible segmentation of those vertical fins, to allow for the expansion and contraction of the metal they are made of, should settle the matter.

  The original renderings of the building showed the floors, which the large windows make completely visible from without, lighter in tone than the metal panels between the banks of windows, and this suggested a contrast between the vertical and the horizontal elements of the structure, but that contrast is, fortunately, almost nonexistent in the finished product. Even the fluorescent-lighting fixtures in the ceilings, which might break the upward movement, are only dimly apparent; the glass, thanks to the happy choice of color—presenting a much pleasanter interior view than the usual blue-green glass would—carries through the sombre bronze note that unifies the whole façade. I shall come back to the color in a moment. But first let me note that no small part of the aesthetic impact of this façade derives from its undeviating austerity both in idea and in execution. There are only two departures from bronze and glass: the use of dull-green stone plaques in the vertical column of blank panels (in lieu of windows) that run all the way up the northeast and southeast corners of the tower—panels that conceal an elaborate complex of windbracing—and the use of unbroken dark bronze sheathing as the facing for the windowless top stories, where the mechanical equipment is housed. The central structure is a shaft and nothing but a shaft, straightforward in concept, solemn in color, sober in execution, a building whose absolute simplicity and consistency has only one rival I can call to mind—John Root’s Monadnock Building (1889–91), in Chicago, the last of the great masonry skyscrapers, and one that is equally free from a meretricious use of color or ornament. Until 375 was finished, I had doubts about the use of dark bronze for sheathing; if any considerable area of the city were to blossom forth in this material, the total effect would be a bit depressing. But if one accepts the fact that this is not just another business building but a singular monument, that its aloof, aristocratic qualities are not likely to be often repeated in a city where—to resort to that classic confession of the realty financier—“money does not look ahead more than five years,” this choice of dark bronze, meant to deepen in tone but not change, even under our heavy sootfall, is justified. Here is the effect that Raymond Hood aimed at, but did not quite achieve, in his design for the American Radiator Building, built of black brick, which faces Bryant Park. Van der Rohe’s tower was designed to flout the fashions and to weather indifferently all changes, including changes in the weather. That choice, like the form itself, was one of the many lessons of the Master. The relief is almost as welcome as a serious and thoughtful face in a news photograph. (Whether the architect’s intention will eventually be betrayed by the particular bronze alloy used for the facing is another matter, still, alas, in doubt.)

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  As one crosses the open plaza that intervenes between Park Avenue and the building, in a few steps one is lifted out of the street so completely that one has almost the illusion of having climbed a long flight of stairs. One faces a vast, continuous wall of plate glass, two stories high, behind the columns that mark the entrance. This glass curtain encloses the ground floor but reveals the travertine-covered inner walls and the elevator shafts, all of which emphasize the transparency of the outer wall. The columns—six of them, square, covered in bronze, and striated by vertical lines a few inches apart—define the entrance with a becoming massiveness and dignity, which also increase the diaphanous air of the outer wall. A canopy above the entrance juts forward, with rectangular severity, to indicate the function of the opening and to bathe the space below, at night, with its inset lights. The pavement of the plaza, of granite divided into large, unemphatic squares, continues right into the building—no attempt here at a change of texture, at color, at irrelevant decoration; outside and inside are simply the same. The noble scale of the entrance is not just an outside pretense but an inside reality; again the clients showed themselves ready to sacrifice rentable space to achieve an aesthetic effect that does more to set this building apart than the most lavish murals or the most exuberant horticultural display. The serene effect of pure space itself, now vanished from the great railroad stations of New York, and even from the New York Public Library, has once again been recaptured; the design itself wars against the “noisy crowding up of things,” which in the days of Rome’s decadence sent men into the monastery to find visible peace and order. Even the black bands of the cove lighting in the lobby ceiling, which is of multi-toned gray mosaic, serve to point up, by their sharp contrast, the firm, undeviating integrity—and masculinity—of this design. Such purity and dignity are completely lacking in most contemporary metropolitan architecture, with its endeavor to humanize what is inhuman and to refine what remains so patently vulgar. One must almost go back to Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, for anything like the same quality of mind and expression. Only at a single point is the purity of this design betrayed, and then by the very rigor of its execution. Since the side streets slope toward Lexington Avenue, the entrances from them are by way of a flight of steps covered with a glass canopy, of transparent glass and perilously elegant, and leading to revolving doors. But a transparent glass roof in New York is a drawing-board dream; even a daily hosing down of the canopy would not guarantee a transparent surface a few hours later—and what looks dirtier than even slightly soiled glass? The lobby terminates in a glass wall, behind which a restaurant is destined to open. Of that spacious approach and that setting one can utter only this sentiment: May the food and the service be worthy of it!

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  Since this building was designed, first of all, to meet the needs of the corporation, producer of many whiskeys, that built it, one is tempted to appraise the quality of the corporation’s own quarters, done directly under the eyes of the architects, and I turn aside from that beguiling path with reluctance, all the more because there is a certain warmth and fantasy in the decoration, of a sort that is usually absent from van der Rohe’s almost surgically aseptic designs. However pure this building is, it is not a pure Mies building, and I am not sure that it is the worse for this. Purity, the perfection of a single aesthetic idea to the neglect of all the other human requirements that enter into a many-dimensioned work of architecture, has gradually developed into a grave weakness in van der Rohe’s work—so grave, in fact, that it very nearly undermines his claim to being still a practitioner of architecture. (This vice is usually even more conspicuous in the work of his disciples, who come forth with waxen imitations of the Master’s sterile white flowers.) Van der Rohe’s famous motto, “Less is more,” comes to mean, in the end, “Nothing is even better,” so that he reaches in his later buildings the final terminus, where architecture dissolves into constructive sculpture and sculpture itself deliberately disappears into a geometric void. (At this point, it remains for Hans Andersen’s little boy to r
emark that the Emperor wears no clothes.) The virtue of the flawless treatment of the structure of 375 lies precisely in the discipline it imposes upon those who must minister to other than formal aesthetic needs. I think none the worse of the decorators because they have covered one wall of the main Seagram reception office with glass cases in which a variety of liquor bottles form a repeating pattern (this is both an honest symbol and a handsome one), nor, on another floor, would I look down my nose at the abstract mural that turns out to be a chart of production flow in a Seagram plant, though I can well imagine that both these embellishments might cause van der Rohe exquisite pain. But it is the Miesian background that makes these and similar modifications so grateful to the eye—the textured woven-bronze-wire and stainless-steel sheathing of the elevator interiors, the wood panelling of the conference rooms, the excellent lettering and numbering (at once small and bold), and even some of the abstract paintings. After a fast, the simplest meal has the effect of a feast. I have not yet had the opportunity to see how far his chaste example has influenced the people who designed other offices of the building.