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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Modern and contemporary art- Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
- Manet, Olympia
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Mary Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Munch, The Scream
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
- Analytic Cubism
- Matisse, Goldfish
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
- Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
- Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
- Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
- Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*short version*)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*long version*)
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Lam, The Jungle
- Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
- Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park
- de Kooning, Woman I
- Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
- Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
- Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
- Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay
- Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
- Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
- Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players
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Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
The Seagram Building, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is a bronze-clad skyscraper in New York. It's a blend of modern and classical architecture, with a symmetrical design, vertical mullions, and a bronze exterior that's maintained with oil. The building's design pays homage to Greek and Roman architecture, offering a unique architectural experience. Created by Beth Harris, Steven Zucker, and Smarthistory.
Want to join the conversation?
- Office building as corporate art...not an idea I had ever thought about. Architecture as art. I really like it. What else produced now do you think will end up representing the art of our age to the future?
Personally, I hope it isn't Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Hall).(17 votes) - You should add plans and sections of the building to the video.(8 votes)
- Here's a link to the plan of Seagram Building.
http://todesignllc.com/uploads/images/Blog/blog-seagramsbuilding.jpg(3 votes)
- I wanna learn that piano intro now. It's so iconic in AP Art classes(6 votes)
- Here it is!
https://youtu.be/P086bauEXAU
The intro of all of the Smarthistory videos begins at. 0:11
It's originally a GarageBand jingle called 'Buddy'. You can also hear other parts of the song in other famous series (i.e. Food Wishes.)(4 votes)
- cool, but could you show more of the inside?(4 votes)
- Extremely functional, also focuses on the aesthetics of the building. Not to mention the gorgeous curtain walls implemented on the buildings; invented by Fazlur Rahman. Well done!(4 votes)
- what is architecture means?(1 vote)
- Architecture is the design of building and houses.(6 votes)
- Lots of Bronze was used on the building. It is and was expensive. But were those external I beams "bronze" or "bronzed". In the digging around I did, the best I could come up with is "bronze toned"
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. 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 1,500 tons of bronze in its construction.at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagram_Building, the footnote to which sent me to a NY Times article which I couldn't access.
So, "Bronze" or "Bronzed"?(2 votes) - These are some of the most accurate subtitles you have, but could someone please edit for spelling? They repeatedly use "it's" for the possessive. It should be "its" -- no apostrophe. Since this is a learning platform, these things are important.(1 vote)
- Why is the top of the building black is this purely decorative or it is some sort of large conference room(1 vote)
Video transcript
(gentle music) - [Steven] I'm with Matthew Postal, who is an architectural historian. We're on Park Avenue at 53rd
Street, and we're standing in front of one of the
most important buildings in the history of architecture
in the United States, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's
the Seagram Building. - [Matthew] It's built
between 56th and 58th. Mies had been designing
buildings of this kind since the 1920s, but he never had a chance
to build an office building, so it's the first
opportunity to see his ideas. - [Steven] There was
a lot that intervened. You have the war, the
revolution in Germany. Mies was developing his
ideas first in paper, in the '20s, as you said, and then you have the
end of the Depression. - [Matthew] He moves to the United States. He designs the campus
of the Armour Institute. - [Steven] And then he
has this commission, Seagram Building. Now, Seagram was a Canadian company. It's a liquor company. It was perhaps the world's
largest liquor company at the time, and they wanted to have their
headquarters in New York. - [Matthew] They decided
to build a headquarters in the mid '50s. They looked across the street. They were impressed by all the notoriety that Lever House had garnered. - [Steven] Which was that
first real modern icon to show up on Park Avenue. - [Matthew] The first curtain
wall building in Manhattan. Charles Luckman, who had been one of the
chief executive officers at Lever had been trained as an architect and had left Lever to open his own firm. Luckman gets way past
the preliminary drawings. There's a large model. - [Steven] Bronfman, who ran Seagram's. - [Matthew] The model is
sitting in his office. His daughter, Phyllis Lambert, she was studying at Harvard in the School of Architecture and Design. She says, "Dad, that's the most
awful thing I've ever seen." She says, "Dad, we're gonna go over to the Museum of Modern Art, and you're gonna speak to Arthur Drexler, the Chief Curator of Architecture." And Drexler said there were three choices. There was Le Corbusier, too
difficult to work with, he said. There was Frank Lloyd Wright- - [Steven] The obvious
choice, the American. - [Matthew] But too old.
He was almost 90 years old. And he suggested that they go with Ludvig Mies van de Rohe. - [Steven] And that's what they did. - [Matthew] Well, he's built
a relatively simple form, a bronze-clad slab of a tower. - [Steven] Okay, hold on a second. It's bronze, and his sculptures
are made out of bronze. - [Matthew] That's why I always say that this is not only
one of the modern icons of architecture in New York, but it's also one of the
most classical buildings in the city. - [Steven] So you're thinking classicism in terms of the ancient
Greeks creating sculptures. This is a building that
actually has a patina, like a sculpture would. So it's not just a
uniform dark brown/black. It's actually got some
subtlety to the color in, really, an enormously
sophisticated way. - [Matthew] It's a little
darker than it originally was, but imagine that each
year, at least once a year, they rub it with oil so
that it does not oxidize. - [Steven] Oh, that's great. So it doesn't turn green
or red, or what have you. - [Matthew] Yeah. Mies really loved Greek
architecture over all other things, and so he designed a building
that is very symmetrical. It's a very disciplined aesthetic. And if you look at the various pillars that run across the front, they look vaguely like fluted columns. - [Steven] So that's really interesting, because they do have
these vertical striations, so it is a kind of fluting, and in fact, the whole building
is up on this platform. It's almost like a Greek stylobate, as if we were looking at the Parthenon. - [Matthew] Absolutely. - [Steven] There's a
sense of proportion here that feels very classical, and it's incredible to
be able to say that, despite the building's height, 'cause this is a big building. And the Greeks were working on a much smaller scale than
the Romans were working on, a slightly larger scale,
but nothing like this. - [Matthew] That's the challenge. How do you distill the
lessons of the ancients in a building that's
made of metal and glass? - [Steven] And is that
even an absurd project, to try to take an industrial culture and an industrial material
and wed it somehow to buildings that are 2,500 years old? - [Matthew] Mies would say no. The modern movement in architecture was always looking for some discipline, it was always looking
to balance old and new, and this was one of the
solutions that he found. - [Steven] So let's take
a look at the building. It's very clean. When you look up at it
from below, it just soars. The trimming that comes to
mind is vertical velocity. - [Matthew] Like an ascent. - [Steven] We just rocket upward visually. - [Matthew] Look carefully
at the vertical mullions that are between the window bays, and they basically rise
without interruption from the base of the tower to the top. - [Steven] They're not simple mullions. They look like I-beams. They're girders. - [Matthew] They serve no
purpose other than decoration. - [Steven] And decoratively, they make the surface
so that it's not flat. They give it some texture, they give it a little depth, and it gives it a bit of a play of light. - [Matthew] When the
building was constructed, they talked about industrial
materials and honesty and those kinds of issues,
but as time has passed, they recognized that it wasn't beyond Mies to experiment with a
little bit of decoration. - [Steven] And so it's decorative, but it's a kind of decorative
symbolism, isn't it? Because the I-beam is the thing that's actually holding the building up, but these are depurposed. They're reflecting what's
inside the building, the actual interior structure. - [Matthew] Yeah, on a smaller scale. - [Steven] And I assume that
inside, they're actually steel. They're not bronze. We were talking about the
classical a moment ago, and the Parthenon, for
instance, was heavily decorated, so there's no prohibition there, but it does seem to be
a little bit anathema to the way that we generally
think Mies van der Rohe, or we think of the modern movement, as really wanting to
strip away the unnecessary and the decorative, and
yet he's allowing for it. - [Matthew] I think it's a
stereotype about modernists to think that it's without any decoration. - [Steven] Because there
is actually gorgeous use of not only the bronze exterior, but the mosaic's marble, granite, and you've got these
beautiful reflecting pools in front of the building. - [Matthew] Based on a
kind of square-foot budget, this is one of the most
expensive buildings of its time because of the materials. Bronze costs a great
deal more than aluminum. - [Steven] It's fortunate
it's mostly copper. - [Matthew] Look at the travertine that the elevator banks are wrapped in. - [Steven] When you look
at those elevator banks, and there are four of them, they actually move past the glass membrane that encloses the lobby. The glass is like a soap bubble, and they've pushed through it. - [Matthew] I think they give
the building real solidity. - [Steven] So that's what
visually holds it up. - [Matthew] Yeah, and
it also makes reference back to the ancient Romans. - [Steven] How so? - [Matthew] 'Cause
that's Roman travertine, though again, Mies is constantly
referencing antiquity. - [Steven] The building
is really not using much of its footprint. The building is really deeply
set back on Park Avenue. - [Matthew] About as far back as it could, although it has a couple of
smaller additions in the back. When Mies was asked why did he set the building back so far, he said that he wanted to pay respect to the Racquet and Tennis Club directly across the street, that he did not want to overwhelm that great Italian palazzo
by McKim, Mead, and White. - [Steven] And it's actually
one of the great buildings in New York. This is quite an intersection. You have Lever House, Tennis and Racquet, and you've got Seagram. That's a hell of a triumvirate. - [Matthew] I think he
wanted to create a corridor for his building to be viewed. I think by coming up those steps at the end of the Plaza and
looking up at the building, it provides an architectural experience that people don't often have in New York. - [Steven] But there's
something else here. It feels like this is a public space, a place where people gather,
and in fact, as we're here, there are people who
walk and stop and talk, there are people sitting
by the reflecting pools, and it becomes a kind of a social space. - [Matthew] He kept the seating
at the edge to a minimum. There never appears to
have been any intent to encourage people to stay here. - [Steven] So that's an interesting issue. One of the faults that
is found with modernism is its antiseptic quality, its coldness, its lack of humanity and human scale. Do you think that Mies
has created something that allows us to occupy it comfortably, or is this something that
is alienating in some way? - [Matthew] I think it
depends where you come from. (gentle music)