Word: seagram
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Whatever his decision, Kerkorian should be able to wrest MGM's reins from Edgar Bronfman, who is president of Seagram's, chairman of MGM and owner of about 16% of MGM stock. (TIME Inc. owns 5%.) Bronfman strongly opposed Kerkorian's first tender offer but took no position on the second. Kerkorian flew to Manhattan last week to meet MGM executives but kept silent as to whether he will try to oust Bronfman or President Louis ("Bo") Polk from their MGM posts...
When no existing furniture quite matched the modern grandeur of his Barcelona pavilion, he designed his own tables, stools and chairs in leather, steel and glass-which have since become classics in themselves. For Manhattan's Seagram Building, in its muted bronze and pink-glass majesty the country's most handsome office building, he had a mock-up made of the bronze mullions that hold the vertical windows in place. They are H-shaped in cross section, and Mies elaborately studied the dimensions of their outer edge for the shadow line it would cast on the enclosed windows...
...equally demanding of the building's occupants. Each day, as darkness falls, all the ceiling lights in the Seagram offices automatically turn on at a set intensity, so that the building will stand against Manhattan's evening skyline just as Mies planned that it should. Similarly, any tenant moving into his apartment houses on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive has to accept the gray fiberglass curtains that Mies specified for their floor-to-ceiling windows. A bon vivant who enjoyed fine-tailored suits, gourmet food, and huge cigars, Mies once contemplated moving into his own building, then...
...anybody can do." To a large extent, he succeeded. Summarizing his achievement in a speech some time ago, Architect Philip Johnson said: "Le Corbusier invents, invents magnificently and, as at Ronchamps, makes a new shape of monument for the world to admire. Mies purifies and purifies till, as at Seagram, he makes the paradigm for America's tall building. I don't want to be interesting, I want to be good,' he liked to say. Ronchamps is more amazing; Wright's Guggenheim far more extraordinary; but the Seagram Building may perhaps be the most 'good...
...absorbed into architectural thought that the young have often felt impatient at the Mies formulas, the "less is more," the implicitly arrogant demand to produce something more spare, more pure. Mies' discipline is demanding, and except in his hands, a confining one. No one can build a better Seagram Building. And by its very austerity, Mies' esthetic provides no vocabulary for a whole city landscape-a topic that obsesses most young architects, who talk not of individual buildings but of "reshaping the urban environment." A city, or even an avenue lined with Seagram Buildings would be a desolation...