The Seagram Building and the Bomb ______889
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____________________________ THE SEAGRAM BUILDING AND THE BOMB _________889 The Seagram Building and the Bomb: Architecture, Atomic Anxiety, and the Cold War in the United States BENJAMIN FLOWERS Georgia Institute of Technology Introduction on very expensive Manhattan real estate, the Seagram Building re-defined the image of This paper explores the influence of the Cold corporate wealth in the late-1950s (Figure 1). War on the design and reception of one the What program was this luxury designed to seminal office buildings of the 20th century: the serve? What motives fueled this expenditure? Seagram Building. Using material collected from the archives of the Seagram Company as An examination of corporate records and the well as the papers of the Bronfman family, I cavalcade of voices that greeted the building explore how the technology, wealth, and power when it opened reveal the wide variety of ends necessary to construct the Seagram Building to which the Seagram Building’s construction was linked in the late 1950s and early 1960s to was seen as a means. While the classical the social and political milieu of the Cold War, geometry of Mies’ design is often called in particular the bomb. timeless, contemporary responses to the building without doubt highlight the social, Completed in 1958, the Seagram Building cost political, and cultural tensions prevalent in the a small fortune to build.1 Indeed, Architectural United States in the 1950s. For some the Forum claimed that, at $45 per square foot, it Seagram Building was an index to the rising was the most expensive office tower ever built prosperity of the nation and the strength of “in Manhattan or anywhere else.”2 In addition, American capitalist democracy. Others mixed the building occupies only about half of its site, their appreciation of the building’s appearance sacrificing valuable (and obviously rentable) and appointments with the atomic anxieties of square footage. Mies van der Rohe had the era, leading one magazine to comment already secured a reputation as a modern that the building can “boast of more architect who embraced sumptuous materials superlatives than the H-bomb.” Indeed such and the Seagram Building proved beyond anxieties are evident in the plans (later doubt that Miesian minimalism could take on abandoned) to construct an atomic blast an extremely luxurious form. It’s worth noting shelter in the basement, a move some at the outset that the building was not executives thought would advertise Seagram’s mortgaged, but rather paid for in cash from good corporate citizenship. Finally, many the company coffers. With I-beams and regarded the building as an advertisement for spandrels made of bronze, marble shear walls the whiskey (and other liquors) the Seagram and elevator cores, furnished with designs by Company sold and took to calling it the “big, Hans Wegner, Charles and Ray Eames, bronze, booze building,” and the “world’s Florence Knoll, and Eero Saarinen (among tallest high-ball.” Here I explore the others), appointed with works of modern art in motivations behind the Seagram Company’s numbers great enough to fill a small museum, construction of their corporate headquarters as and with its dramatic setback and plaza located well as the popular and critical responses to it 890_______ FRESH AIR ______________________________________________________ in order to better understand the influence of Empire State Building, while its nearest the Cold War on postwar modern corporate later rival, Lever House, more package architecture.3 than Pyramid, looks curiously transitory and ephemeral when one Located in the city that epitomizes the restless turns from one to the other.” He activity of the American marketplace, it seems concluded “Somber, unsmiling, yet not inevitable that Seagram Building should grim, 375 is a muted masterpiece – materialize the particular mode of capitalist but a masterpiece.”10 organization of its time, and do so in a laudatory fashion. The Seagram Building, built If critics and the public were sensitive to the in an era when, as Lary May notes, “politicians details of the design, they were also taken by and businessmen spoke with one voice in the expense of the venture. When the praise of the modern corporation,” explicitly Seagram Building opened the Wall Street identified itself with just such a large, modern Journal was quick to point out its luxurious corporation.4 In addition, while earlier appointments and use of land meant that it skyscrapers such as the Empire State Building cost “about double what it would take to erect were symbols of an era rooted in the values of a building of comparable size.”11 While an older producer economy—and its attendant setbacks in front of large New York buildings definitions of Americanism—the Seagram are commonplace today and arouse little Building emerged from an expanding consumer passion, in the late 1950s the Seagram culture amidst the tensions of the Cold War. Building’s plaza, with its innovations that Furthermore, this particular economic and melted snow off the granite and kept the geopolitical context (aligned with the fountains from freezing, and with its 180 foot increasing importance of marketing and public long Vertgard marble benches weighing in at relations in corporate America) meant the half a million pounds, was the epitome of Seagram Building was engaged in the material and technological luxury. A few years construction of both a business entity and a after it opened, Time magazine, reviewing particular way of life. In the popular press and recent developments in New York City, noted architecture journals of the time the that “the rich, understated dignity of Mies van skyscraper symbolized not just material power der Rohe’s bronze Seagram Building set the but national identity.5 style for a lavish squandering of space for plazas and fountains.”12 Clearly the When the Seagram Building first opened, corporation that built in such a manner was critics generally focused on its abstract, affluent and willing to pay for prestige. timeless, and classical elegance. Roger Montgomery cited the Seagram Building However, in the case of the Seagram Building, approvingly as an example of a building that the office tower was expected to communicate “transcends the meaningless idea of taste and other virtues as well, namely respectability and the equally meaningless fetishism of technique power. The building must be understood as an for its own sake.”6 Progressive Architecture extension of Seagram’s chief executive, praised “its arrangement of space” and was Samuel Bronfman, a man with little interest in “tremendously moved by the suave beauty of architecture, but deeply concerned with social the shaft.”7 The New York Herald Tribune status. Seagram, in the 1950s, was one of the editorial page claimed it was one of the few largest manufacturers and distributor of spirits new buildings to “breathe whole new shapes in the world. Whatever associations the liquor into our lives… [it] creates around itself a industry has today, in the 1950s it was still feeling of space and light that is rare in popularly associated with bootlegging, Manhattan.”8 The Wall Street Journal, organized crime, and corruption. These were mingling aesthetic and economic assessments, often associated with the Bronfmans as well, found the “bronze-sheathed tower with a as their mammoth empire (worth tens of plaza” made “extravagant use of land.”9 Lewis billions of dollars before it was sold in the Mumford wrote: 1990s) had its start as a supplier for smuggling operations along the Canadian border during “this seems to me the best skyscraper Prohibition era.13 Samuel Bronfman always New York has seen since Hood’s Daily insisted that his company never did anything News Building; in classic execution it illegal, but his son accedes that “from the towers above the doubled height of the beginning of their experience in the beverage- ____________________________ THE SEAGRAM BUILDING AND THE BOMB _________891 alcohol business until the end of American interest – give the proper impression Prohibition, the Bronfmans dealt with to shareholders, trade, public – will it bootleggers.”14 This wasn’t a small operation, have advertising value? Should the and the profits it accumulated weren’t either. building be modern or traditional? If According to some estimates, nearly half of all traditional, will it soon be outmoded – the liquor that made its way into the United just another office building. States during Prohibition had its origins with the Bronfmans.15 By the mid-1950s the Do modern concepts of building fit in Bronfman’s retained their market dominance; with our ideas of background, age, one out of every three beverage-alcohol drinks stability?18 sold in the U.S. was marketed by Seagram.16 Would modern architecture communicate the Paradoxically, the trade that provided Samuel impression of age and stability Samuel Bronfman great wealth also denied him the Bronfman pursued throughout his life for the measure of respectability accorded other titans “House of Seagram?” How would Seagram’s of industry. The association with bootlegging different business constituencies – was one Sam Bronfman struggled for decades “shareholders, trade, public” – view the to shrug off, asking in his later years: “How building; would it leave them with “the proper long do you think it’ll be before they stop impression?” calling me a goddamn bootlegger?”17 Within the context of the Cold War American “Gangland’s Grip on Business” democracy was inexorably linked to capitalism. In earlier periods in American history, the free This seemingly innocuous phrase, “the proper market, and its tendency to monopolize impression,” needs to be understood as economic and political power in the hands of something other than a standard business an elite few was understood to be in conflict generality; in the context of the time its with the spirit of a democratic republic.