Seagram Building

From Free net encyclopedia

The Seagram Building is a skyscraper in New York City. It was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and was completed in 1958. It is 156.9 meters tall and stands as a building of corporate modernism. It was designed as the headquarters for the distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons, thanks to the foresight of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Seagram's CEO.

The Seagram Building (and the Lever House, which sits just across Park Avenue) set the architectural style for skyscrapers in New York for a several decades. It appears as a simple bronze box, set back from Park Avenue by a large, open granite plaza. 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 wrote what would become the nation's first comprehensive building code, 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 did so with relatively unsuccessful results.

But the building itself (and the International Style in which it was built) had enormous influences on American architecture. One of the style's characteristic traits was to express the structure of buildings externally; a building's structural elements should be visibile, Mies thought. The Seagram building (and virtually all large buildings of the time) was built of a steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Mies would have wanted the steel frame to be visible to all; however, American building codes required that all structural steel be covered in a fireproof material (steel, with its low melting point, will fail in fires), usually concrete. This hid the structure of the building — something Mies wanted at all costs to avoid — so Mies used non-structural bronze-toned I-beams to suggest structure instead. These are visible from the outside of the building, and run vertically like mullions in the large glass windows. Now, observers look up and see a fake structure tinted bronze covering a real steel structure. However, this method of construction using an interior reinforced concrete shell to support a larger non-structural edifice has become commonplace.

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

Another interesting aspect of the Seagram building regards the window blinds. As was common with International Style architects, Mies wanted a complete regularity in the appearance of the building. One aspect of a façade that he disliked was the irregularity in appearance when blinds have been drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building look disorganized. To reduce this, Mies used blinds that only worked in three positions - fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

The Seagram Building is located at 375 Park Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan.

The Arts Tower in Sheffield was constructed as a half-scale copy of the building but using inferior materials.

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