Word: levers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, the firm that has designed the proposed replacement for Lever House, has charged that Lever is out of date and badly deteriorated, requiring restoration that would cost millions of dollars. Retorts William Conklin, vice chairman of the landmarks commission: "It's absolutely ridiculous to say that the building is falling down. It is unfair exaggeration used for political impact...
Much as Grand Central was early in the century, Lever House was at mid-century the proud proclamation of a new era. The spirit of this epoch was, in a way, as bold and arrogant as that of the railroad magnates. It was the period of great national and, ultimately, international corporations...
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...
...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...