Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{18. Seagram Building, Manhattan, New York City (1954–8); architects: Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Philip Johnson (born 1906). Mies van der Rohe was an architect of great seriousness, who was head of the experimental design school, the Bauhaus, in Berlin. He left Germany during the 1930s and moved to Chicago, where he developed his concern for carefully considered steel-frame buildings. His earlier American commissions were in and near Chicago, and included a startlingly transparent steel-frame house for Edith Farnsworth (1945–51) and a pair of apartment buildings overlooking Lake Michigan, 845–60 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (1948–51). Here too the outer skin of the building is all glass, subdivided by an absolutely regular steel grid. The Seagram Building was a far more prestigious project, both because of its prominent site and its lavish budget. The glass here is bronze-tinted, and the vertical mullions between the windows are dark bronze. Instead of making the building step back from the pavement line on its upper storeys in order to conform with the building codes, the building makes the extravagant gesture of devoting a good deal of the site to a public open space, and then the building is taken up vertically from the edge of the plaza to the top, without breaking the lines of the mullions. In a city where the price of land was lower, the gesture would have been less sensational and more easily imitated. The building has been seen as authoritative, as showing how to shape a classic steel-framed tall office building, and it has been much imitated, without its mystique being undermined.}

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