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date version of the symbolism that encrusted the old-school skyscraper, from the 1913 Woolworth Building’s ecclesiastical Gothic terra cotta to the 1930 Chrysler Building’s silvery hood-ornament gargoyles. Here Mumford veers into the mode of cultural historian, seeking the larger truth embedded in Lever House’s popularity. At the beginning of the review, he suggested its modesty might start a new humanist trend. By the end he sees it as nothing less than a rebuke of Cold War attitudes. The United Nations Secretariat, completed two years before, should have been a symbol of democracy at work but failed in its emblematic task. Mumford, having thoroughly enumerated the building’s virtues as advertisement and as workplace, can now turn his mind to its meaning. After Lever, the deluge. Lever got an even more elegant neighbor, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1958), catty-corner across the street. The postwar boom required so much building and that building up seemed to be so entirely in glass, that by the late 1960s the style had been exhausted. Modernists began to investigate concrete and stone; postmodernism returned the skyscraper to the pastiche of historic architectural language Sullivan had mocked. Skyscrapers continued to be built, but until the fall of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, they had become urban wallpaper. Mumford’s utopian words came to seem sadly prescient, and again the tall office building became freighted with meaning. The building that stepped into this history—and proved to be a worthy vehicle for formal, historical, and symbolic writing—is Foster + Partners’ Hearst Tower. Almost all the building’s reviews reached for comparisons to the storied modernist past begun by Lever House (now rebranded as the Mad Men era), typically through to its last embodiments, the 1967 Ford Foundation by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates and the Marine Midland Building, in order to put Hearst into context. The goals for the building, if not its muscular aesthetic, seemed in alignment: new technologies, an advanced curtain wall, a symbol of defiance in the face of terror. Like Lever, it was a showcase and an advertisement, this time for sustainable architecture and the design bona fides of its owner, the Hearst Corporation, a magazine and newspaper publisher. It was a building that meant more than a building. Like Lever House, it plays with Sullivan’s organic tripartite division and is without the skyscraper’s traditional crown.