Introduction to History of Contemporary Architecture

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Seagram Building, New York (1954-58) - (Federico
Bucci)

Looking at Park Avenue, Manhattan, from this splendid window draped with a curtain made from
fine metal chains, is a unique experience which, alone, is worth a visit to the Four Seasons restaurant,
a meeting place for celebrities since the late 1950s. We are at the ground floor of the Seagram Building,
New York’s most beautiful skyscraper, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and
inaugurated in 1958. More specifically, perhaps, we are inside a place where time has stopped in the
middle of modern civilisation’s most mature and successful season: that short period during which
American engineering embraced the great European culture. The design of Seagram Building’s interior
spaces, including those of the famous restaurant, was entrusted by Mies to Philip Johnson, his co-worker
at the time and later known for the casual and provocative stylistic eclecticism of his work. However,
the source to which he is inspired for the spectacular solution of the curtains undoubtedly belongs to
the history of German architecture: in fact, it comes from the bedroom for Queen Louise of Prussia in
Charlottenburg Castle, designed in 1809 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, one of the architects who most
influenced Mies. This is well explained by Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for
Architecture and also daughter of Samuel Bronfman, the Canadian magnate that commissioned the
Seagram Building: in her recently-published book, she examined the history of the skyscraper’s
construction, right from the choice of the architect, who she herself proposed to her father. We began
by discussing a construction detail, not only because, as Mies used to say, “God is in the details”, but
also because the beauty of this skyscraper lies in the way in which the choice of materials embellishes
and makes unique the simplicity of its form: a dark, metallic monolith facing onto a white stone
platform, with marble benches, pools of water and plants. Let us go on, now, to list the building’s
measurements: the total height of the tower is approximately 157 metres (the original measurement is
515 feet), with 39 floors, built on a rectangular plan 26.7 metres wide and 43.6 long; to the rear is
attached a lower body. The load-bearing structure is a steel and concrete central core clad in travertine;
the envelope is made from bronze T-beams and smoke grey glass walls; and, finally, the flooring of the
atrium and external plaza is made of granite. In the description of the newly-completed skyscraper,
published in the January 1959 issue of the Italian architecture magazine Casabella-Continuità, we read

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the following words: “In the bronze façade of the Seagram Building, a top contemporary architect has
brought the (perhaps formally superior) fruit of the European tradition of rationalism into the heart of
the first city of America”. Furthermore, the article particularly praises the way in which the building is
placed within the urban grid: “The granite plaza at the foot of the Seagram Building is totally
exceptional in the urban fabric of Manhattan, especially considering that it prevents full use of the plot,
thus reducing the maximum buildable volume (with the imaginable economic sacrifice). We note with
interest, beyond the underlying publicity motives for such a feature, the perfect town planning solution
of this building’s architecture. The plaza, which extends into a portico beneath the building, gives the
skyscraper a different and unexpected sense of scale, permitting the direct measurement of man, the
individual, against the building”. The text bears a distinguished signature, Aldo Rossi’s, at that time
student at the Politecnico di Milano before becoming the most influential and celebrated protagonist of
the Italian architecture, taken from us all too soon. His words, not only masterfully capture the secret
of the Seagram Building and the entwinement between humanitas and urbanitas upon which Mies van
der Rohe’s art of building is based, but also demonstrate how important is the study and the critical
interpretation of the work by the masters of Modernism, in order to become good architects.

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