The Age of Glass by Stephen Eskilson

Author:Stephen Eskilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 4.7 Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, MoMA Building, 1939.

Think of just the storied few: the United Nations Secretariat, 860–880 Lake Shore Drive, Lever House, the Seagram Building, Pepsi Cola headquarters—the 1950s witnessed the rise of that ultimate modernist icon, the glass box skyscraper. While generally viewed as encapsulating the refined minimalism of Miesian aesthetics, these buildings in fact functioned more like the billboard architecture of any benighted commercial strip. Park Avenue in New York in particular became dotted with huge virtual signs advertising liquor, soap, soda, and airlines. While Lewis Mumford called it “chastely free of advertising,”16 he recognized how the then-bold decision to eliminate storefronts from the ground floor of Lever House served to reinforce the concentrated advertising message of the building itself.

While the glass curtain wall made its first postwar American appearance at the Secretariat, it was Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s 1952 Lever House that best captured the architectural moment (figure 4.8). The first sealed glass building complete with three-zone artificial climate, the tower’s 1,404 green-tinted plate glass windows matched to slightly darker glass spandrel panels created a seamless glimmering form floating above its base like an avant-garde dream. Outside of whatever residual mystical feeling could be conjured up by the individual viewer in sight of all that colored glass, this new kind of building substantiated the functionalist mantra of efficiency, clarity, and truthfulness. Critic Aline Louchheim seemed to sense the suppressed expressionist vibe:

Astonishingly, although the expression of structure is direct, the first impression of Lever House is “coloristic” and poetic. What saves these effects from being contrived, merely picturesque or anti-architectural, is the fact that we know and can always see (when we consciously or subconsciously seek that reassurance) that they are logically dependent on the structural scheme of the building, visual effects neither denying, contradicting nor confusing the constructive facts.17

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