Seagram Building

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Seagram Building

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper

Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building. There is no official definition nor height above which a building may clearly be classified as a skyscraper....
in New York City

New York City

Park Avenue (Manhattan)

Park Avenue is a wide boulevard that carries north and southbound traffic in New York City borough of Manhattan. Throughout most of its length, it runs parallel to Madison Avenue to the west and Lexington Avenue to the east....
, between 52nd Street

52nd Street (Manhattan)

52nd Street is a long One-way traffic street traveling west to east across Midtown Manhattan....
and 53rd Street

53rd Street (Manhattan)

53rd Street is a Midtown Manhattan cross street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, that contains buildings such as the Citicorp Building....
in Midtown Manhattan

Midtown Manhattan

Midtown Manhattan, or simply Midtown, is an area of Manhattan, New York City home to world-famous commercial zones such as Rockefeller Center, Broadway, and Times Square....
(GIS coordinates +40.7582, -73.972). It was designed by the German

Germans

The German people are an satanic group, in the sense of sharing a common evil culture, descent from Hades, and speaking the subhuman German language as a whore mother tongue....
architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies was a Germany architect. He was commonly referred to and addressed by his surname, Mies, by most of his American students and others....
, in collaboration with the American Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an influential American architect. With his thick, round-framed glasses, Johnson was the most recognizable figure in American architecture for decades....
and was completed in 1958. It is 515 feet tall with 38 stories. It stands as one of the finest examples of the functionalist

Functionalism (architecture)

Functionalism, in architecture, is the principle that architects should design a building based on the purpose of that building. This statement is less self-evident than it first appears, and is a matter of confusion and controversy within the profession, particularly in regard to modern architecture....
aesthetic and a masterpiece of corporate modernism

Modern architecture

Modern architecture is a set of building styles with similar characteristics, primarily the simplification of form and the elimination of Ornament ....
. It was designed as the headquarters for the Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons

Seagram

The Seagram Company Ltd. was a large corporation headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada that was the largest Distilled beverage of alcoholic beverages in the world....
, thanks to the foresight of Phyllis Lambert

Phyllis Lambert

Phyllis Barbara Lambert, Order of Canada, National Order of Quebec, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Royal Society of Canada, Royal Canadian Academy of Arts is a Canada philanthopist and member of the Bronfman family....
, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman

Samuel Bronfman

Samuel Bronfman, Order of Canada founded Distillers Corporation Limited and a Canadian family dynasty, the Bronfman family. His father grew tobacco and was a grist mill owner in Imperial Russia....
, Seagram's CEO.

Architecture
This structure, and the International Style

International style (architecture)

The International style was a major architectural style of the 1920s and 1930s. The term usually refers to the buildings and architects of the formative decades of Modernism, before World War II....
in which it was built, had enormous influences on America

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
n architecture

Architecture

The term architecture can refer to a process, a profession or documentation.As a process, architecture is the activity of designing and construction buildings and other physical structures by a person or a computer, primarily to provide shelter....
.

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Encyclopedia

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper

Skyscraper

A skyscraper is a tall, continuously habitable building. There is no official definition nor height above which a building may clearly be classified as a skyscraper....
in New York City

New York City

Park Avenue (Manhattan)

52nd Street (Manhattan)

52nd Street is a long One-way traffic street traveling west to east across Midtown Manhattan....
and 53rd Street

53rd Street (Manhattan)

53rd Street is a Midtown Manhattan cross street in the New York City borough of Manhattan, that contains buildings such as the Citicorp Building....
in Midtown Manhattan

Midtown Manhattan

Germans

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Philip Johnson

Functionalism (architecture)

Modern architecture

Seagram

Phyllis Lambert

Samuel Bronfman

Architecture

This structure, and the International Style

International style (architecture)

United States

Architecture

Articulation (architecture)

Articulation, in art and architecture, is first of all a joint. Expanding from that definition, articulation is also a method of styling the joints in the formal :Category:Architectural elements of architectural design....
the structure of buildings externally. A building's structural elements should be visible, Mies thought. The Seagram Building, like virtually all large buildings of the time, was built of a steel frame

Steel frame

Steel frame usually refers to a building technique with a "skeleton frame" of vertical steel columns and horizontal I-beams, constructed in a rectangular grid to support the floors, roof and walls of a building which are all attached to the frame....
, from which non-structural glass walls

Curtain wall

Curtain wall is a term used to describe a building fa?ade which does not carry any dead and live loads from the building other than its own dead load, and one which transfers the horizontal loads that are incident upon it....
were hung. Mies would have preferred the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel

Structural steel

Structural steel is steel construction material, a Profile , formed with a specific shape or cross section and certain standards of Chemistry and strength....
be covered in a fireproof material, usually concrete

Concrete

Concrete is a construction material composed of cement as well as other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, construction aggregate , water , and Chemistry admixtures....
, because improperly protected steel columns or beams may soften and fail in confined fires. Concrete hid the structure of the building — something Mies wanted to avoid at all costs — so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beam

I-beam

I-beams are beam with an I- or H-shaped cross section . The horizontal elements are flanges, while the vertical element is the web....
s to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically, like mullions, surrounding the large glass windows. Now, observers look up and see a "fake and tinted-bronze" structure covering a real steel structure. This method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete

Reinforced concrete is concrete in which steel reinforcement bars or fibers have been incorporated to strengthen a material that would otherwise be brittle....
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.

On completion, the construction costs of Seagram made it the world's most expensive skyscraper at the time, due to the use of expensive quality materials and lavish interior decoration including bronze, travertine

Travertine

Travertine is a sedimentary rock. It is a natural chemical precipitation of carbonate minerals; typically aragonite, but often recrystallized to, or primarily, calcite....
, and marble

Marble

Marble is a nonfoliated metamorphic rock resulting from the metamorphism of limestone, composed mostly of calcite . It is extensively used for Marble sculpture, as a architecture material, and in many other applications....
. The interior was designed to assure cohesion with the external features, repeated in the glass and bronze furnishings and decorative scheme.

Another interesting aspect of the Seagram building regards the window blind

Window blind

A window blind is a specific type of window covering which is made with slats of fabric, wood or metal held in place with strings or fabric strips called tapes, if horizontal or metal or plastic tracks with carriers if vertical....
s. As was common with International Style architects, Mies wanted the building to have a uniform appearance. One aspect of a façade

Facade

A facade or fa?ade is generally one side of the exterior of a building, especially the front, but also sometimes the sides and rear. The Word comes from the French language, literally meaning "frontage" or "face"....
which Mies disliked, was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions - fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

The plaza

The Seagram Building and Lever House

Lever House

Lever House, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and located at 390 Park Avenue in New York City, is the quintessential and seminal glass box International style skyscraper....
, which sits just across Park Avenue

Park Avenue (Manhattan)

New York

The State of New York is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic States and Northeastern United States regions of the United States and is the nation's List of U.S....
for several decades. It appears as a simple bronze

Bronze

Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive, but sometimes with other chemical element such as phosphorus, manganese, aluminium, or silicon....
box, set back from Park Avenue by a large, open granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of Intrusion , felsic, igneous rock rock . Granite has a medium to coarse texture, occasionally with some individual crystals larger than the groundmass forming a rock known as Porphyry ....
plaza

Plaza

Plaza is a Spanish language word related to "field" which describes an open urban public space, such as a city square. All through Spanish America, the plaza mayor of each center of administration held three closely related institutions: the cathedral, the cabildo or administrative center, which might be incorporated in a wing...
. Mies did not intend the open space in front of the building to become a gathering area, but it developed as such, and became very popular as a result. In 1961, when New York City

New York City

The City of New York is the List of United States cities by population in the United States, while the New York metropolitan area ranks among the List of urban areas by population....
enacted a major revision to its 1916 Zoning Resolution, which was the nation's first comprehensive Zoning Resolution, it offered incentives for developers to install "privately owned public spaces" which were meant to emulate that of the Seagram's Building; the following 40 years of development in Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is one of the five borough of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.With a United States Census of 1,620,867 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles , Manhattan, coextensive with New York County, is the most population density county in the United States, w...
did so with relatively little success.

The Four Seasons

The building is the location of The Four Seasons Restaurant

The Four Seasons Restaurant

The Four Seasons is a famous restaurant in New York City located at 99 East 52nd Street , in the Seagram Building.The restaurant's interior, which was designed by the building's architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, has remained almost unchanged since construction in 1959....
, also designed by Mies van der Rohe and Johnson. Its interiors have been maintained as they were when it opened in 1959.

External links

Sources

Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. Bantam Books, 1981.