s k y s c r ap e r s a s s u p e r lat i v e s
Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM ), the firm that would become synonymous with tall office buildings that came after Lever House. The second floor is the only one to fill the block from sidewalk to sidewalk, and consists of a pizza box–like form, with a hole cut out of the center. Poking out over the top of the box are hedges that border the employees’ garden adjacent to the cafeteria. The whole building is covered in a skin of green-tinted glass, clear at window height, opaque below it, and shiny stainless-steel mullions divide the panes. The ground level is open, except for the transparent glass–enclosed lobby directly under the tower. In a 1957 article titled “The Park Avenue School of Architecture,” Ada Louise Huxtable named Lever House the original of this school of building: “Lever Brothers’ trend-setting green glass tower...established the vogue for glass walled buildings and was soon flanked by imitations.” The revolution Lever offered was threefold: it brought European modernism to New York; it created a new, publicspirited office type; and it transformed an outmoded street into a cohesive urban experience. Mumford predicted this transformative aspect right away: “If its planning innovations prove sound, it may become just one unit in a repeating pattern of buildings and open spaces.” The space notched out of the skyscrapers built on Park and Sixth avenues makes it possible for a pedestrian to get out of the flow and actually look at the buildings. The curtain walls became the part of the building that expressed its message. The open court, the weeping willow in a planter box, the fishbowl lobby suggest to Mumford the beginning of “a new competition to provide open spaces and a return to the human scale.” The word competition is key to Mumford’s critique: Lever House changed the rules of the skyscraper game. “For years, businessmen vied with each other in the attempt to put up the tallest building in the city,” he writes, and loftiness was all. That competition was really a form of advertising: being the tallest provoking the repetition of the company name, provoking free publicity at the opening. In Lever’s case, such decadent and antiurban showmanship was unnecessary. It didn’t need to be the tallest, because it was the best: “The building itself is a showcase and an advertisement; in its very avoidance of vulgar forms of publicity, it has become one of the most valuable pieces of advertising a big commercial enterprise could conceive.”
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