Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  “The skyscrapers are too small, and there are too many of them,” Le Corbusier concluded, dumbfounding the press that followed him. “The reasoning is clear and the supporting proofs abundant, streets full of them, a complete urban disaster,” he continued.57 In his eyes Manhattan had made the mistake of seeing skyscrapers as “plumes” rising from the face of the city rather than as functional forms for organizing and controlling populations, “a prodigious means of improving the conditions of work, a creator of economies and, through that, a dispenser of wealth.”58 But they were marred by unnatural functions, such as generating money for real estate developers. They rose in steps like Mesopotamian ziggurats, thanks to ineffective zoning laws. Worst of all, they were unable to provide the calm, quiet conditions of work that were within our grasp but nowhere realized. Le Corbusier began to imagine what it would be like to have truly perfect offices. “Office life, made intensely productive through mechanical rationalization: post office, telephone, telegraph, radio, pneumatic tubes, etc.… thus the benefit of excellent psycho-physiological conditions: luxury, perfection, quality in the whole building—halls, elevators, the offices themselves (quiet and pure air),” he intoned, before launching into an attack on the still unrationalized Parisian office: “Ah! wretched, mediocre and miserable offices, an unsuspected degradation of the spirit of work—those entrances, those grotesque, ridiculous, idiotic elevators, those dark and bleak vestibules, and the series of dim rooms open on the hubbub of the street or on the dreariness of courts.”59

  Le Corbusier’s office design for a project in Algiers (1938–1942).

  New York was on the verge of breaking away, of showing the world what it could do with the organization of offices through skyscrapers; it had only to complete the revolution it had begun. Le Corbusier’s vision went under different names: Ville radieuse (“radiant city”), Le Corbusier sometimes called it, or cité d’affaires (“business district”), or ville contemporaine (“contemporary city”). Though the plans differed from year to year, in essence he imagined a flat cityscape punctuated by massive towers, rising as high as 720 feet, spaced evenly across a radiating web of streets, in which the offices rested atop foundations of shops designed to serve the towers (“the common services of the skyscraper restaurants, bars, showrooms, barber shops, dry-goods stores, etc”). In a way, Le Corbusier’s dreams had already been realized in Raymond Hood’s Rockefeller Center, an entirely self-sufficient white-collar island. But following Le Corbusier, architects around the world would come to imagine urban utopias that consisted entirely of office workers: the influential Japanese architect Kenzo Tange’s plan for Tokyo, in 1960, was a design to centralize the “tertiary industrial population” (that is, white-collar workers).

  The penchant for conglomerating business functions in single spaces had been a hallmark of progressive office design, from the Pullman Building on. But perhaps Le Corbusier’s most lasting gift to the future of the office was his ideological embrace of glass. “The exterior of the skyscraper, the façade—the façades—can be a film of glass, a skin of glass. Why repudiate richness itself: floods of light coming in.”60 It would be a keynote of the new style of architecture coming to American cities, soon to be dubbed the “International Style”—thanks to the promotion of American architects Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and an exhibit they mounted with that title at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Associated with European architects, such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the International Style was essentially the name for architectural modernism, which was initially formed in order to solve urban problems (such as workers’ housing) with new materials (concrete), free from the modes and concerns of the past; it ended up being the style that Americans used to express corporate power. Whatever had initially been “international” about the International Style soon became identified with the United States and, through it, the architecture of corporate globalization.

  Along with concrete, glass was the ideal expression of austere architectural modernism, and its use has persisted into the wilder forays of our postmodernist times. As Mies van der Rohe (or simply Mies, as he preferred to be called) would show with his Barcelona Pavilion in 1929, and his American acolyte Philip Johnson would repeat with his marvelous Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, glass was an extraordinary medium for facilitating light, elegant spaces within domestic-scaled interiors—a perfect, airy complement to the flat slabs of modernist roofs and walls. Cut into varying shapes and occasionally colored, it could resemble a miniature by Mondrian. Scaled to the size of an office building, however, it could transform a tower into a shimmering thing, a mass of living light, reflecting the low brick buildings of an older skyline or the slow amble of a cloud. As early as 1921, Mies, then in Weimar Germany, had sketched his dream of a glass-and-steel skyscraper; he had dared to imagine a pure sheet of glass seemingly unimpeded by climbing mullions or cinching spandrels. As any city dweller anywhere in the world knows, his dream has been realized in extraordinary, even obscene abundance, with latter-day crystal palaces cresting every skyline.

  Glass had always been a potential replacement for stone exteriors, ever since steel frames had eliminated the need for load-bearing exteriors. But a fully glass “curtain wall”—that is, an exterior sheath protruding and masking the building, much as a curtain shielded a window—presented problems for the interior environment. For no one needed as much light as a glass “skin” would create in a building; in fact, a glass exterior would allow in inordinate quantities of warmth, producing a greenhouse effect that would fry the inhabitants—something Le Corbusier found out the hard way with his Cité de Refuge, a Salvation Army hostel and one of the earliest large glass-walled buildings, which was impressively temperate during the winter that it first opened but embarrassingly broiling by the ensuing summer.61

  Luckily for modernists, technology swept in to sanction their worship of the god of glass. Willis Carrier, a man as important in some ways as Thomas Edison but nowhere near as hallowed, began his experiments with controlling interior humidity around the turn of the century. He spent years with trial-and-error attempts to use spray nozzles and filter out airborne water drops from saturated air. But soon a number of patents came together to allow the automatic filtration of air and its thermal control. “Man-made weather,” the Carrier Corporation haughtily called it, well into the decades when others were content to use the more commonplace and easily understood term “air-conditioning.”62 It took several decades to become widespread, initially being adopted in large auditoriums and other amphitheater-like spaces and later being deployed in office buildings. The first American office building in the International Style, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1933), outfitted with a stylish glass curtain wall traversed by glinting mullions, was also the second fully air-conditioned office building in the country. (The first was the Milam, built in San Antonio in 1928.) Observers began to record the new and startling phenomenon of seeing office workers huddling in thick sweaters in the middle of summer, shielding themselves from the blasts of frigid air.

  Two other inventions coincided with the rise of air-conditioning: the fluorescent lightbulb, which consumed vastly less energy than bulbs of traditional wattage; and the suspended ceiling, which, like the curtain wall protruding from the frame, hung down from the actual load-bearing ceiling, opening up a space in between the two levels. It was suddenly possible to hide the wiring for light fixtures and the tubes for air-conditioning—they could be sequestered between the two ceiling levels. The ceiling heights were reduced, leading to the compressed, boxed-in floors we know today. Though glass was intended to bring light in, air-conditioning and fluorescent light made it possible to push people farther and farther into the depths of the building, where they might get no natural light at all, let alone air (with powerful winds buffeting the top floors of the skyscraper, it was impossible to keep the windows open). From the 1950s to early 1960s, the depth of office floors grew exponentia
lly: in 1962, the average tenant occupied 2,622 square feet, double the number from 1952, the first year such a number was recorded.63 In roughly the same span, the number of white-collar workers had also doubled.64

  With the completion of the UN Secretariat Building in 1952 and its enormous sea-green sheath of glass—its design partly by the hand of Le Corbusier—the signal was given to go wild. Glass boxes began popping up all over the country, inspired by the same “form follows finance” principle that had sanctioned the previous building binge. Only seven years later, the New Yorker’s architecture critic Lewis Mumford would enumerate a depressing catalog of the new office building landscape: “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 favourite 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.”65

  Mumford, a polymathic student of urban history and stern critic of the excesses of architecture, was one of the most widely read and conspicuously ignored writers of his day. He would be an inspiration to Jane Jacobs (author of the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities) in his criticisms of urban renewal. And he would be satirized as a “collectivist” in Ayn Rand’s paean to lone architectural genius, The Fountainhead, whose architecture critic character Ellsworth Toohey, the “collectivist,” was partly modeled on Mumford. Yet, somewhat like Rand, Mumford worried over the homogenizing tendencies of postwar life and feared that beneath the flashy technological advances of consumer society lay bland anonymity and spiritual homelessness. Architecture was failing to house people in more practical ways as well. His repeated charge against modernism was that it didn’t accommodate “human functions and human needs”—the barest requirement, one would think, of architecture. He was a “sidewalk critic,” posing not as an expert insider architect but as a city dweller concerned with how architecture affected the inhabitants of a city as well.

  In his view even the most startling and powerful architectural symbol, the skyscraper, merited the charge. “At no point in the evolution of the skyscraper was the efficient dispatch of business under conditions that maintained health and working capacity the controlling element in the design,” he wrote in the 1950s. It came from a review of the UN Secretariat Building, which he would hold up for particular censure. It exemplified the chief defect of the form: disregard for the needs of the workers inside. Fundamental aspects of the design had unintended, miserable consequences. The building had been built running north to south, which meant that the windows faced east and west. In the mornings, the sun rising over the East River had an unimpeded penetration into the building’s glass facade, meaning that the workers on the perimeter of the building had to draw shades to keep themselves from being fried. On the other hand, not everyone enjoyed the benefits of the abundance of light. For the offices themselves, the architects had simply adopted the standard T formation. This meant that the secretaries’ offices were separated by opaque glass partitions; whatever seeped through was their only natural light, in a building that otherwise had it in abundance. Such obvious disregard for the building’s workers reminded Mumford of tougher times: “New York’s tenements of the eighteen-fifties had exactly the same kind of partition, a pitiful effort to atone for the fact that no daylight or ventilation was provided for the inner bedrooms. To see this symbolic substitute for light and air reappearing in a building that prides itself on its aesthetic modernity is like seeing Typhoid Mary pose as a health inspector.”66 Small amenities were missing, like cafés on each floor where workers in different departments could socialize. Mumford was one of the earliest writers to recognize the importance of random interaction and collaboration in workplaces. Isolated workers in austere conditions, utopian plans leading to dystopian spaces: these critiques would constitute a leitmotif in complaints about offices in the decades to come.

  Despite his disdain for the skyscraper—he considered it an “obsolete” form—one emerged on Park Avenue that managed to satisfy nearly all the strictures Mumford held. Indeed, the headquarters for the Lever Brothers company—affectionately called Lever House by most—became one of the great office buildings of the time. Designed on the outside by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), coordinating with Raymond Loewy Associates for the inside, it was a model for countless other glass skyscrapers to follow and a likely source for the Sterling Cooper advertising agency offices in Mad Men. A dramatically thin slab of green glass rising from a flat base, it took up only 46 percent of the buildable floor area for the site and broke with the skyline of Park Avenue by having its principal face directed south rather than east, toward the street. In the richness of its materials and the lovely, tactile glass skin, the Lever House seemed to embody all the futuristic ambitions of 1950s America, as well as its unexampled prosperity and guileless optimism. Three out of its four sides were covered in a sheer skin of glass, divided only by the horizontal blue-green stainless steel spandrels that indicated the division of floors, accentuating the fresh image that Lever, which sold soap and cleaning products, was naturally trying to promote. To add an exclamation point to this congruence of building and corporate image, a mechanical cleaning apparatus was designed especially for the building; cleaners in their window-washing gondola scaled the tower every day, keeping the glass smoothly reflective.

  When it opened, Lever House was an instant hit. Life observed that pedestrians and taxi drivers slowed down to a near halt when they passed by. Remarking on the open forecourt of its lobby, with its sleek marble and steel-encased columns, BusinessWeek reported the pleasure of not knowing whether one was in an office building or a resort hotel.67 After it opened, a building designed for only twelve hundred workers was burdened by thousands of visitors, demanding entrance “as if this was the eighth wonder of the world,” Mumford wrote. Yet Lever House was successful not simply because of the outward show it made before the public (although this was extraordinary enough). It was also thoroughly designed in its interior to give maximum comfort to its employees. Rather than taking the standard office unit as the building block, or (in Sullivan’s words) “cell,” for the building, the interior designers designed their space around the desk. In other words, the offices were designed with the open steno pool in mind, not the executive suite.68 The desks themselves were old-fashioned, with rounded corners (“to reduce the number of nylon snags,” according to Mumford), and had adjustable heights. Though offices lined part of the perimeter as usual, the building was only sixty feet wide, meaning that most desks were never more than twenty-five feet from a window. Amenities abounded: the second floor had an employees’ lounge, colored a dark green and mustard yellow; the third story had a luxuriously fitted kitchen and cafeteria; the roof of the building’s base had a garden for outdoor seating. The only flaw in Mumford’s eyes was a retro-styled and garish executive floor, which broke from the new practice of having executives and employees seated “democratically” in similar spaces, on the same floor.

  The shimmering curtain wall of Lever House. Ezra Stoller, ESTO

  Lever House’s thin, light-filled interior. Ezra Stoller, ESTO

  There was, however, a danger contained in the success of Lever House. “Standing by itself, reflecting the nearby buildings in its mirror surface, Lever House presents a startling contrast to the old-fashioned buildings of Park Avenue,” Mumford wrote approvingly, before sounding an ominous note: “But if its planning innovations prove sound, it may become just one unit in a repeating pattern of buildings and open spaces.” By 1958, the pattern was beginning to emerge. The Colgate-Palmolive Build
ing three blocks south (by Emery Roth & Sons), and the Davies Building (by the same) at 57th Street, were among the half dozen imitations that had sprung up just a few years after the appearance of SOM’s dazzling slab. And when Park Avenue had already been glutted with slick curtain walls, Sixth Avenue offered a fresh chance to repeat the same dismal success. The grid of the curtain wall and the grid of the city streets began to converge with uncanny precision. Where the earlier skyscrapers had pointed up their aloof, ornamental dignity, the new glass slabs emphasized corporate organizational form, and irremediable rationality. The curtain wall had become a simple, neutral technology, endlessly reproducible. It was a potentially nightmarish vision that director Alfred Hitchcock nicely turned into a joke in the Saul Bass–designed title sequence for North by Northwest, slotting actors’ names into a grid that gradually revealed itself as the Secretariat’s immense curtain wall: so human beings do have a place in this world.

  Only one of Lever’s neighbors equaled, if not surpassed, its triumph. This was of course the topaz-tinted wall of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. Having opened just a few years after Lever, Seagram’s dark glass facade and bronze mullions immediately presented a contrast: a rich, bracing whiskey to Lever’s sudsy sea green. Like the Lever House, the Seagram Building ostentatiously disdained the buildable area, the central tower seeming to float on a handful of columns, set back amid a gleaming, almost blindingly white travertine plaza graced with two reflecting pools. Unlike Lever, which broke the sight lines of Park Avenue by orienting its central tower east–west, the thirty-five-story Seagram faced, with a kind of solemn forthrightness, the city it delicately belonged to. Across the street, it engaged in dignified, urbane dialogue with McKim, Mead & White’s neoclassical racquet club from 1911. The marbled plaza encircling Seagram seemed at once capacious and austere. It was designed to encourage gawking—the ceiling lights were shaped like panels and when lit up at night mimicked the exterior curtain wall—if not necessarily lingering. (In contrast, the brilliant, iconoclastic Italian architecture critic Manfredo Tafuri saw Seagram as adopting “a perfect and disquieting silence” in the midst of an urban “chaos.” It was the “void as symbolic form”—pure negation of the urban setting.)69 It became a pop culture icon in the film The Best of Everything (1959), set in a fictional publishing house in the building. One of the early shots of the film, in which the character Caroline Bender (Hope Lange) is seen looking up at the building, became reproduced as Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #14, one of her most famous images.