The Lever House, located in Midtown Manhattan, denoted a paradigm inside the corporate architecture in the USA when its construction finished in 1952. It was designed by the architect Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois, partners of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). Together with Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building are the most important ones of New York Modern Architecture.
The Project was put in charge by the Lever Brothers Company in order to find a new corporate identity. Bunshaft answered his client’s wishes with a building of prismatic form of 21 storeys with similar tiles, a horizontal podium that is separated from the floor by piles and creates a patio on the ground floor and a terrace on the top. The structure of the building hides behind a squared polished glass façade –a symbol of the corporate rationalism-.
For Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), the Lever House is the fist office building in which the modern materials, the modern construction and the functions of the modernity united in just one being. Immediately after its opening, the building was already an architecture symbol, not only for its image but also for its diverse technologic innovations: firstly, it was one of the first buildings in incorporate a full air conditioning system deliberately to close completely the building and be able to create a thin wraparound. Secondly, it has a cleaning gondola to maintain the wraparound, so all the enclosure was totally hermetic, and finally, a correspondence transporter, which join all the storeys, was installed.
In the miesian curtain wall, the external position of the mullions had a sense not exclusively tectonic, giving relief and machining tectonicity to the glass facades. The dematerialised image of the building is created by hiding the mullions behind a thin glass skin, so they pretend to float, without weight, as the structure does not exist. That allows offer to the exterior qualities of the pan de verre, as flatness in the pure prims declared by Le Corbusier and reinterpret by Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owing & Merrill, SOM) in this buildings and others, as for example: Pepsi-Cola Headquarters (New York, 1958-1959). Even having one pane glasses.
The Bunshaft’s buildings show this way an alternative flatness to the fine volumetry of the miesian curtain wall, image that adopted his contemporaries, in a period in which the formal links of the skyscrapers move from the machining universe to the abstraction of the contemporary plastic arts, in particular to the reductionist abstraction of the minimal-art.
The plan that was made in one of the most exclusive places of New York, corresponded with an urban gesture, putting aside the economic criterions, Bunshaft decided to liberate an area near the building, putting the tower back to the façade and letting only the storeys of the podium to reach the end of the building site, obeying this way the Zoning Law of 1916. Mies van der Rohe makes something similar to Bunshaft for the Seagram in 1957, in a plot opposite to the Lever House, with the difference that Mies moves back all the building and created a public square emphasizing the building and separating himself of the tender of pushing to the limit the skyscrapers construction, to urban growing credit.
In 1982, after a long battle in order to not demolish the building, the Lever House was designated as Historic Place in New York and registered in National Register of Historic Places in New York City in 1983. The building, which was erected with a 7 million dollar budget, was restored with a 25 million dollar budget in 1998.
The 29th of April of 1952 it was opened in Midtown, Manhattan, the first building in New York with complete glass architectural surroundings, the Lever House. It aspired to amaze a metropolis where the skyscrapers were the prevailing typology, and it achieved it.
New York that at that time had constructive systems, in which the architectural surroundings was made of walls drilled by large windows, shown off an elegant skyscraper covered by green-blue glass then.
The innovation of placing a gondola to keep the window panes in perfect condition, made the building an attractive sight to the citizens.
New York that at that time had constructive systems, in which the architectural surroundings was made of walls drilled by large windows, shown off an elegant skyscraper covered by green-blue glass then.
The innovation of placing a gondola to keep the window panes in perfect condition, made the building an attractive sight to the citizens.
More information
Published on:
May 9, 2016
Cite: "Gordon Bunshaft and SOM at Nueva York, Lever House " METALOCUS.
Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/gordon-bunshaft-and-som-nueva-york-lever-house>
ISSN 1139-6415
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