International Style Architecture
Gordon Bunshaft, Lever House Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore Owings and Merrill, Lever House, 1951-52 (390 Park Avenue, NYC) Speakers: Dr. Matthew A. Postal and Dr. Steven Zucker
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- This is Steven Zucker and with Matthew Postal who is an architectural historian,
- we are looking at Lever House, we are on Park Avenue, 53rd Street in New York City.
- Lever House is really one of the great iconic post-war international style buildings.
- It's georgeous and it's so perfect.
- It was restored several years ago by the architects who designed it - Skidmore, Owings and Merril.
- So they brought back, well not the original team, but they brought back the original firm.
- The chief designer Gordon Bunshaft had passed away but they had the original blueprints
- and they could get it back to where it was.
- It is so pristine and it's so much about reflectivity and about light.
- What makes this building signifcant?
- It is the first glass curtain wall office building in Manhattan.
- This building is now completely inundated by much larger buildings that are also glass and steel.
- But what did this look like originally in 1952 when it was finished?
- Can you imagine when it was finished, all of the buildings that surrounded it
- were faced in brick and stone.
- This really must have stood out, it must have been incredibly radicle.
- How is it that corporation could have been that brave to do somethinng so extraordinary.
- Not to mention Skidmore, Owings and Merril.
- I think a lot of it has to do with the patron.
- One of the chief officers at Lever was the man named Charles Luckman.
- Not only had Luckman trained as an architect, but he had been at Johnson Wax
- when they worked with Frank Loyd Wright on their signature headquarters.
- So that's really interesting.
- He saw first time the value that really innovative architecture might have on a company
- and the way that could produce really sort of important public face for the firm.
- Yeah, it's definitely about populistic.
- And of course Lever interestingly enough made so that building really just speaks of a kind of cleanness,
- and a kind of sharpness and a kind of clarity.
- And that feeling would have been even stronger when it was completed
- because the limestone in brick buildings that surrounded it
- would have been 30 or 40 years older that time and they probably would have needed a good cleaning.
- And so this building is georgeous with reflective green glass, clear glass,
- this steel trim aluminum and then there is this beautiful marble,
- this is white marble that just amplifies the sense of modernity and any kind of its industrial nature.
- It's really very strict in its geometry in the way in which it is balanced.
- The building is really made up of two buildings, isn't it?
- It's two forms. One horizontal and the other vertical.
- Of course it is actually integrated physically but visually it really does look like two objects, one stuck on the other.
- Almost one floating over the other.
- I have found them balanced against each other.
- So was Gordon Bunshaft really developing his ideas himself or were there ideas that he was borrowing?
- Where does this come from?
- It's in the air. When I look at this building rather than pointing at one source,
- I'd rather point to two different sources.
- And that would be the ideas of the French architect Le Corbusier and the architect Mies van der Rohe.
- Both of them were really interested in taking in industrial culture
- and introducing that, do I have it up to that point that the architecture was fairly old fashioned
- and really historical in its view.
- And so it is really interesting that we have an American and putting into practice these European ideas.
- How did that work?
- The great depression of the thirties, the second world war.
- We are one of a few places where one could attempt to put those ideas into place.
- But now here in a corporate environment, right?
- They used these ideas at the United Nations a year or two earlier
- but this is the first time that American corporation embraces these ideas.
- Kind of set the trend.
- One of the things I'm really interested in about this building is its interior, but still exterior space.
- Because you know, when you look at the building from across the street,
- it's the horizontal slab, it's the vertical slab but you come underneath into the courtyard
- and the whole space openes up.
- Where else in New York can you sit in a centre...
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