The Seagram

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, 375 Park Avenue (1958)

Cutting through a narrow street with adjoining series of retail and tall corporate office buildings aligning both sides of East 52nd Street from Madison Avenue, one approaches the end of the block to confront the vertical monumentality of the Seagram Building rising out of the northwest corner of a spacious intersection between 52nd Street and Park Avenue.

Famously designed for an office tower by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the revolutionary glass-and-steel skyscraper marks its own territory by a vast public plaza on the street. Against all profit-maximizing strategies of real-estate development, Mies generously sets back the Seagram from the gridlines, not just at the front but also at the sides, an unconventional method known to the dense urban setting of Manhattan. Like a Greek temple, the plaza acts as a stylobate, slightly elevated from street level and connected to the main sidewalk by a few thin strips of steps. Unlike the ubiquitous corporate skyscrapers in the surrounding area, the public plaza sets an appropriate stage for the Seagram to be displayed and admired by pedestrians, inviting them to ascend the steps and enter into a liberated public space, safe and unhindered by traffic. The vastness leads people to slow down their pace and relax their minds, to stroll, pause, and rest along the northern, southern and western perimeters of the plaza. Reminiscent of the reflecting pool at his Barcelona Pavilion in the International Exposition in Barcelona in 1929, Mies instills two relatively smaller versions on both sides of the plaza entrance to extend like arms, creating a winged portal to welcome visitors and inhabitants of the building. Accompanied by trees and greenery on the sides, he lightly ornaments the central axis of each pool with a handful of simple, petite fountains, positioned close to the walkway. Recalling the small fountain in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright, the calming sounds of moving water in the lightly colored, shallow pool at the Seagram plaza not only attempts to dampen noise but also provides a miniature oasis of tranquility amid the hustle and bustle of New York City, a break from hectic corporate life. The shallow depth and clarity of the pools reflect the shininess of the soaring glass tower as well as the luminosity of the lights that permeate from the interior heights, especially at night. In effect, the external water features not only appeases and replaces the overwhelming diminution of the human individual at the base of the skyscraper with an assurance of serenity and repose, but also effaces the juxtaposing materiality between glass tower and granite plaza to unite the soaring of heights with a down-to-earth quality, integrating indoors and outdoors into one masterpiece. 

Following Le Corbusier's principles in his 'Five Points of a New Architecture', Mies raises the bulk of the shaft on pilotes, but instead of completely freeing up the ground, he creates something of a peripteral floor plan for the lobby, and extends the plaza into the lobby, again seamlessly weaving outdoor space with indoor space. It also results in a sheltered walkway bordering the steel-and-glass lobby, which cannot be clearly distinguished from afar, due to the transparency of its large glass panels and the uniformity of the dark bronze piers. From the facade, the six slender piers that stand before the lobby to support the building appear similar to the colonnades at a Classical temple front. In a sense, thin steel piers become the Modern equivalent of the Greek orders, made possible by industrial technology and mass production. At the lobby entrance, a cantilevered deck protrudes slightly to provide shade, but more importantly, to navigate people towards it as the formal main entrance.

The entire building stands out in elegant simplicity in the composition of modern materials: the result of combining together the glass curtain wall with bronze steel frame results in thirty-eight rows (which can be discerned and patiently counted) of uniformly shaped vertically rectangular dark glass windows. The expansive area of glass maximizes penetration of natural light and the views of the city scape, bridging the external and internal environments. The corner pilotes can be evidently seen to rise from street level to the roof, emphasizing the strength and solidity of steel, as though soaring into great heights and pushing past limits, representing the ethos of modernity and its materials. At night in the background of darker skies, the warm light flows out into the streets from within the building, framed by standardized glass displays of identical dimensions. The volume of abundant light that fills and emanates underscores the lightness of the glass-and-steel skyscraper, as though light is the main substance of the skyscraper, and the bronze frame merely functions as a grid skeleton to hold together the radiant body of light. Influenced by Louis Sullivan, the skyscraper not only articulates its function as a modern office building, but can also be understood in the tripartite relationship vis-a-vis a human body: lobby in the base, offices in the body, and mechanical works covered in a box-like crown, from which the curtain wall hangs. Just as the fragility of glass is strengthened by the sturdiness of the steel frames that support them, so too, the modern skyscraper as an architectural icon is balanced by the horizontality and verticality of bronze beams. 

However, (as discussed in the lecture,) the integrity and rationality of structure remain unfulfilled in that the vertical bronze exterior only mimics the true underlying structure of the building, due to zoning regulations and fireproofing standards. Nevertheless, structure is separate from the enclosure, breaking away from the reliance of wall. Mies creatively paints a completely unified whole through the singularity of bronze hues for the reflection of the metal support frame, and for the sophisticated shine that is inherent in the material, as a relevant facade that expresses the true structure. Here, the facade is integrated with the interior without excessive cladding and decoration: the horizontal and vertical lines of the bronze I-beams and resulting glass windows are themselves the ornaments.

During the day, the dark glass reflects images of the opposite street scape, giving the illusion of a distorted mirror. Not only does this promote privacy of the inhabitants within the office building, it also serves as a radically new aesthetic that only arises naturally out of sheets of glass: in attempting to look into the interior through the window, the viewer sees a bit of both interior and the exterior of the building behind him or her, but behold a clear picture of neither: there is a sense of incomplete transparency in terms of people within the building and people without. To the program of an office, however, this effect successfully portrays a metaphor of "transparency in business". While glass structures invite our eyes to wander into what lies behind them and observe human behavior and movement, as advocated by Gropius at Fagus Factory and Bauhaus, and in the "Bauhaus Stairway" painting by Oskar Schlemmer, the viewer at the Seagram cannot fully perceive the inhabitants until nighttime when the sun sets and the building becomes fully illuminated. It is at this time in the darkness that one can perhaps stand across the street and survey the contents of each window cell, seeing, all at once, the life inside the building. Citizens within become like displays inside a shop window or at an exhibition as in a museum. The ideas of seeing without being seen, and not knowing when or whether one is watched are issues relevant to our modern age.

Although simplistic-looking or even boringly ubiquitous to the untrained eye of twenty-first century passersby, traditional ornamentation that used to attract visually is now replaced by the abstract interrelationship of modern materials: a dynamic interplay amid the intrinsic transparency and reflective qualities of glass, the permeating flow of light, the stability of the soaring I-beams, and the inviting platform of the plaza, altogether engenders natural 'illusions' that can be experienced by people in the exterior environment and participated by people within the interior environment -- all of which is set like a stage in the heart of corporate Manhattan. 

Shaft and crown of the Seagram (Sketch)