Seagram Building In 1954 Samual Bronfman, Chairman of the board of Joseph Seagram and Sons, decided to Construction of its new corporate headquarters generated tremendous publicity for the Seagram construct a “building of fine quality” to house the company’s head office in New York City. The construction Company. Articles about the building appeared in academic and popular journals and periodicals. Mies’s of their new corporate headquarters signaled the evolution of the Seagram Company from family-owned dictum “less is more” adorned an article in Time Magazine in 1958. The building’s completion also manufacturers of “branded” consumer products to a diversified multinational corporation. The Seagram coincided with dramatic changes within the Seagram Company. Sales were slipping. “The top group was Building was the first in a series of high-rise curtain wall monoliths that were erected on Park Avenue getting older. General Schwengel, the figurehead president of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc., was in his following construction of Lever House in 1952 that transformed Park Avenue into a monument to the seventies, as was Jim Friel just before his death. Bill Wachtel, the head of Calvert, was in his late sixties, International Style. The Seagram Building represents the felicitous convergence of art and commerce. It and on and on.” Their ignorance of modern marketing techniques had made the old guard expendable. combines themes that had preoccupied Mies van der Rohe since the 1920s with the modern business and “Part of the problem was that Father and Seagram were far behind the new marketing curve.” Edgar marketing requirements of his client. Bronfman, chairman of the administrative committee, urged his father Samual to oust Schwengel and Samual Bronfman had expressed little enthusiasm for modernist architecture. Morris Lapidus had appoint him president of the company. His father complied. After his appointment, Edgar launched a designed the Seagram Company’s first New York City offices in the Chrysler Building in “a Tudor style, much-publicized campaign to revive a failing product, “Calvert Reserve” whiskey, in “order to prove to my complete with fake fumed fireplaces and pegged linen-fold oak panels.” Charles Luckman of the California own organization, to the distributors and retailers, and to the industry that I was qualified to run the architectural firm Luckman and Pereira (and president of Lever Brothers) created the initial blueprints for company.” He demonstrated his awareness of the marketing potential of absence and superfluity by the Seagram Building, which called for a massive structure in the “set-back,” or “wedding-cake” style repackaging “Calvert Reserve” as “Calvert Extra,” and replacing every unsold bottle of “Calvert Reserve” in prescribed by zoning laws and prevailing taste. An article about Luckman’s proposal in the “New Yorker” every retail store in the country with a bottle the “new” product. prompted Phyllis Lambert (Samual Bronfman’s daughter) to return to New York from Paris in an effort to In another statement (paraphrasing a Catholic theologian and philosopher named Romano persuade her father to select another architect. He put her in charge of the selection process. After Guardini under whose spell Mies had fallen) that invokes the epiphany of Christian mysticism, Mies rejecting Frank Lloyd Wright (“His is not the statement needed now.”) and le Corbusier (“One is fascinated conflates technology with transparency, and transparency with truth: “Nothing seems impossible anymore. by his spaces, his sculptural forms, but are not people likely to be blinded by these and skip over the Thus begins the reign of technology. Everything succumbs to its impact. It detaches man from his surface only.”), a committee that included Philip Johnson recommended Mies van der Rohe (“Mies forces restrictions, makes him freer and becomes his great helper, breaks down the isolation of geographical you in. You have to go deeper”), “despite Father’s edict ‘no stilts.’” locations and bridges the largest distances. The world shrinks more and more, becomes surveyable and is The 1916 ordinance was still in place in 1954. Mies’s first challenge was zoning compliance: “On investigated down to its remotest recesses. The characteristics of peoples become clear. Their social and the Seagram Building, since it was to be built in New York and since it was to be the first major office which economic structures are uncovered. World consciousness and a conscious awareness of mankind results. I was to build, I asked for two types of advice for the development of the plans. One, the best real estate Technology offers a thousand means to increase awareness. Nothing occurs anymore that is not observed. advice as to the types of desirable rentable space and, two, professional advice regarding the New York We survey ourselves and the world in which we stand. Consciousness is our very attitude.” Building Code.” Rather than making maximum use of the zoning “envelope,” Mies restricted his building to Media representations of urban corporate life were prevalent in the 1950s and 60s. A cinematic one quarter of its site, rejecting “setbacks” in favor of a monolithic tower. The building is set back 100 feet genre featuring New York City corporate protagonists, frequently advertising executives, who commute from the sidewalk, creating a public plaza with twin fountains. The Seagram Building ”indulges in the luxury form suburban homes to midtown office towers, emerged. Ranging from portentous statements such as of empty space”. Real estate consultants determined the building’s volume by combining the area required The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), directed by Nunnelly Johnson (primarily a screenwriter and by the Seagram Company with a figure considered optimally marketable to leaseholders (the building infrequent director) and The Apartment (1960) directed by Billy Wilder, to banal “knockoffs” such as Lover contained offices in units as small as 500 square feet). The total they arrived at was well below that Come Back (1961), starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, these films project both dreadful and auspicious permitted by the New York City Building Code. images of corporate architecture. Protocols that govern relationships between the sexes and between The advent of steel-frame construction and the elevator at the end of the nineteenth century had employers and employees are common themes in these films. In The Apartment, the corporation is made the construction of buildings of seemingly unlimited height and bulk feasible. In 1900, Cass Gilbert depicted as a predatory patriarchy. In Lover Come Back it becomes a benign site for a coy “battle of the described the skyscraper as “a machine that makes the land pay.” For George Hill “An office building’s sexes” between two corporate executives. The fascination of these films may reflect what Rem Koolhaas prime and only object is to earn the greatest possible return for its owners, which means that it must calls Automonumentality. The architectural grid is not generated infinitely from a single point in space, but present the maximum of rentable space possible on the lot, with every portion of it fully lit.” Opposition to begins at the periphery of a habitable spatial configuration, extending inward and outward. In a sense, two the unregulated construction of skyscrapers in New York emerged early in the twentieth century, and a limit approaches to architecture exist; one emphasizes the disposition of exterior configuration over interior on building heights was promoted by citizens and government officials concerned about the degradation of functionality, while the other reverses these priorities. Conceived on a grand enough scale, the connection the city’s infrastructure. Progressive reformers expressed concern about the aesthetic deterioration of the between exterior and interior dissolves, resulting in a break or “surgical severance” between an “honest” city and the immorality of the huge profits generated by such development. Ultimately, the real estate façade and the activities it conceals. “In the deliberate discrepancy between container and contained New industry itself, in an effort to stabilize the market, brought about the revision to the zoning law effected in York’s makers discover an area of unprecedented freedom.” 1916 that restricted for the first time the height and bulk of new construction. The celebrity of the Seagram Building had unanticipated consequences. In 1963, the New York The plaza had other consequences. It removed the building from its surrounding context, City Commission imposed a “prestige” tax on the Seagram Building, inciting a public outcry that culminated creating a vantage point from which it could be contemplated as an autonomous object, and from which in an article by Ada Louise Huxtable called “Another Chapter in How to Kill a City” published in the New neighboring buildings could be viewed. The Bronfmann family, like the owners of Lever House, eschewed York Times on May 21, 1963. The standard tax rate was “based on a building’s ‘market value’, a figure lucrative street level commercial enterprises. In fact, Gordon Bunshaft, designer of Lever House, tried reached on the basis of net income, capitalized at a customary 6 per cent plus 2 percent for depreciation. unsuccessfully to persuade his client to include commercial properties in the ground floor of his design. By this formula, the Seagram Building comes up with a figure that hovers roughly around $17,000,000. It Two restaurants, designed by Philip Johnson, are located under the plinth, and have discrete entrances. is no secret that this extravagantly beautiful edifice cost $36,000,000 to build. And there, as anyone can Automobile parking, linking the building to its corollary suburban developments, is also concealed beneath clearly see, is more than another $17.000,000 in untapped taxes in a city starved for revenue.” The State the plinth. The way that the restaurants and parking facilities are incorporated into the overall scheme Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court ultimately established a drastically increased tax assessment demonstrates the extent to which form and function conflict.