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lewis mumford
piece of empty formalism—all the worse aesthetically because the movement of people across the front of the building would have given an extra touch of life to a somewhat glacial, if not oversimplified, composition. This seems to me a blemish, but it is not beyond remedy. The office building proper ends with the executives’ offices, on the twenty-first floor. Above them are three floors, outwardly punctuated by the horizontal louvers of the air intakes, behind which are the elevator machinery and a cooling tank. All this is surrounded by a shell strong enough to support the elaborate machine that moves around the perimeter of the roof to raise and lower the window cleaners’ platform. This piece of apparatus was necessitated by the fact that the entire slab, windows and spandrels alike, is— except, as has already been pointed out, on the west side—sheathed in glass, and the windows are all sealed. The windows are four and a half feet wide, and even the smallest private office has two of them. For a company whose main products are soap and detergents, that little handicap of the sealed windows is a heaven-sent opportunity, for what could better dramatize its business than a squad of cleaners operating in their chariot, like the deus ex machina of Greek tragedy, and capturing the eye of the passer-by as they perform their daily duties? This perfect bit of symbolism alone almost justifies the all-glass facade. The slab is the traditional steel-framed skyscraper, with one or two special features. The outer columns are set back a little from the outer walls, so the windows are a continuous glassy envelope, and the mechanical core of the building—the passenger elevators, the conveyor that delivers outgoing mail to the postal department and incoming mail to the proper floors, the coat racks for the office force, the fire stairs—is concentrated in the west end of the slab. If necessary, therefore, a wing could be built south from this end, parallel to Park Avenue, without taking away any daylight from the existing working quarters. The only opaque feature in this house of glass is that demanded by prudence and the fire ordinances of New York—the fire stairs, which are enclosed in a shaft of light-gray brick at the west side of the site and connected with the slab by open passages at each floor level. At the base of the fire tower is the entrance to the fifty-five-car underground garage for the staff. Aesthetically, the exterior of this building has a sober elegance; the stainless-steel window frames and spandrel frames are repeated without
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