Building Seagram by Phyllis Lambert, book review

>>BOOK BUILdINg sEagRam By Phyllis Lambert Yale University Press, £45 Review by Thomas Wensing This page, below: The book cover shows the Seagram Building under construction Right: The completed structure BLUEPRINT APRIL 2013 The Seagram Building in Manhattan (1954-58), by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, is one of those rare pieces of architecture which has come to define an era. For Mies van der Rohe the achievement of the Seagram Building was the resolution of years of theoretical and exacting architectural investigation. The influence of the Seagram Building stretches beyond that of a single work of a modernist master, however. Its significance is also felt in the way it changed planning legislation and became associated with the fragmentation of the urban realm, through the spread of the generic modernist combination of tower, plaza and artwork. In the Fifties and Sixties the Seagram Building served as a powerful symbol of corporate power and success in the USA, and it inspired a flurry of derivative offspring in business districts across the world. In the Seventies, with the economy slowing down and optimism waning, the Seagram company and its building went through a period of profound change. Seagram was no longer making the steady profits it was used to, and postmodernism was mostly blind – not to say hostile – to the quality of the architecture of its headquarters. Times were bad for New York City, and many companies looked to relocate to the suburbs. At the end of the Seventies Seagram sold the building to a real-estate management company (TIAA) and became a tenant in its own building. In 1989 the Seagram Building became a test case for preservation when TIAA lost a legal battle against the awarding of landmark preservation status to the building’s Four Seasons Restaurant. This book goes beyond the usual format of the monograph dedicated to a single building. Author Phyllis Lambert is the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, the CEO of Seagram at the time the company was looking to move from the Chrysler Building into a new, purpose-built headquarters. Lambert, who had studied at New York’s Vassar College, was keenly aware of new developments in the arts and it was through her agency that Mies van der Rohe was appointed as architect. She was then thrust into the building process as the client representative and was an active participant in the Seagram Building design process. She went on to study architecture at IIT, graduating in 1963. Her intimate knowledge of the building, combined with the ability to switch perspectives between her roles as architect, historian and key witness, has resulted in a high-level study, which maintains a healthy scholarly distance and is both meticulous and engaging. She stretches the time frame from the building of Seagram in the Fifties to the way in which the building’s reputation has shifted over the years, and in doing so deepens our understanding of the wider cultural, legal and historical context in which it is set. It’s an irony that Mies van der Rohe once considered architecture to be ‘the will of the epoch translated into space’, while Lambert shows that this will is never singular nor fixed. As she points out, the reading of great works of art develops over time and in this Seagram is no exception. Firstly there is, of course, the Seagram Building as the end-point in the development of the skyscraper as a highly rationalised building type. Mies van der Rohe had long been interested in the office-block typology, and in particular in the right expression for the combination of curtain wall and structural frame. There is a clear trajectory from the early design of a crystalline tower for the Friedrichstrasse competition in 1921 to the Seagram Building in 1954. The former is an example of the expression of the curtain wall, of the reflective qualities of glass and the effective suppression of the frame, whereas the latter achieves a fine balance between glass and frame by adding extruded mullions CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE, MONTREAL. EZRA STOLLER © ESTO 76 ThE BUILdINg... chaNgEd PLaNNINg LEgIsLaTIoN aNd BEcamE assocIaTEd wITh ThE fRagmENTaTIoN of ThE URBaN REaLm on to the skin. Even though this is not structural honesty in the strictest sense of the phrase, it did offer an appropriate tectonic expression to the envelope of the fully airconditioned tower. Secondly, Lambert argues quite convincingly that the articulation of the base as an integral part of the building’s formal expression has always been one of Mies van der Rohe’s preoccupations. From the first and relatively unknown Riehl House (1907), to Villa Tugendhat (1928-30) and the Farnsworth House (1946-51), the base was an important design element in his syntax and was used to respond to site and views and to elevate both subject and object on to the proverbial higher plane. After the historical account of the construction of the Seagram Building and an analysis of Mies van der Rohe’s architectural language and Johnson’s contributions, the book then charts the wider influence the building has exerted. The irony of the building’s legacy is that it turned from a positive to a negative and back again. I refer here to the change in New York’s building codes inspired by the combination of tower and plaza, and to the role the building played in improving legal protection for modern monuments. At first the combination of tower and plaza was a welcome reprieve to the densely packed grid of Manhattan; it highlighted the need for public urban spaces and led to a major change in the city’s building codes. While the objective of the law was to achieve a balance between the public and the private, the result was its opposite: overdevelopment and fragmentation of the urban fabric. Lambert, as an architect and activist, has long maintained that the basis of this law is open to abuse as it’s a simple trade-off between development rights and the provision of ‘public’ space. This model of urban development has spread across the world and resulted in the proliferation of highly controlled and alienating, privately owned ‘public’ spaces. Although landmark preservation is by no means sufficient as a legal tool against the excesses of the realestate market, it is at least a hopeful sign that the social and cultural values embodied in this kind of architecture are being recognised.