Word: bunshaft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...1920s, but it took architects of the next generation, working in the wide-open, up-and-at-'em Western hemisphere, to make European functionalism a ubiquitous International Style during the 1950s and '60s. Two of the most fluent and influential New World apostles were the U.S.'s Gordon Bunshaft and Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer. This week in Chicago the two unrepentant old modernists will share the tenth annual Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pritzker is by far the field's most prestigious award and, with its $100,000 honorarium, the most generous. The tribute, says Bunshaft, "is the nicest thing that...
Charles Luckman, Lever Bros.' president from 1946 to 1950, and an architect, felt strongly that the era needed an architectural expression. He commissioned Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to find it for Lever's new headquarters on Park Avenue between East 53rd and East 54th streets. The inspiration for Bunshaft, who later built the glass-walled PepsiCo, Inc., building in New York City and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., was the International Style. It was the architecture of functionalism that had originated in Europe before World War II and had been introduced...
...Bunshaft's Lever House consisted of two glass slabs. A one-story horizontal slab, partly on stilts, is laid parallel to Park Avenue. A 24-story vertical slab intersects the horizontal one and faces East 54th Street. The openings under the stilts lead to an interior court. The building occupies only 25% of the permissible space, for dramatic effect and to let light into the offices...
...retrospect, Bunshaft's abstract sculpture reflects the anti-urban bias of the early modern movement. Its vertical slab interrupts the building line along East 54th Street. Such disruption is now considered detrimental to an orderly street pattern. And the court Bunshaft created is uninviting and mostly empty...
...these insights came later. In 1952 Lever House was universally praised. On Park Avenue at present, its quality is surpassed only by Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, one block away. Said Architect Eero Saarinen: "Bunshaft should be covered with laurels. He has created one of the finest buildings of our time...