plumbing fixtures, and room partitions, as well as lettering and signage […] eventually expanding to include the design of entire office floors, lighting strategies for the whole building. […] Philip used powerful theatrical effects.” 4 He designed the interiors such as The Four Seasons restaurant and, together with the lighting planner Richard Kelly, the design of the continuous illuminated ceilings that at night turned the building into a luminous object. Later alterations to the building The complex has remained largely unchanged to the present day. The planting of weeping willows on the plaza did not survive and was soon replaced by gingko trees. Conversions works were only undertaken in some of the interiors. In 2000, the architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro designed a restaurant in the building. The building as seen from the present Although the building no longer stands as conspicuously as it once did now that the lower-rise buildings in the surroundings have been succeeded by similarly high and abstract towers, the building has lost none of its monumentality. As Mies was designing the build ing, he had just completed the vast Convention Hall in Chicago which he described as his first building of “really m onumental qual ity”.5 Mies’ buildings – like those of Peter Behrens – consistently displayed an immanent sense of monumentality, but Mies was referring here to sheer size: “But, in fact, there is a certain size that is a reality. Take the pyramids in Egypt and make them only 15 feet high. It is nothing. There is just this enormous size that makes all the difference.”6 “As pleasant as the Seagram Building is,” remarked Philip Johnson in 1978, “it’s still a flat-topped glass box, and that we got a little bit bored with.”7 In retrospect, however, the timeless quality of this building has become ever more apparent, especially in comparison to buildings built over the last few decades. A particular quality of the Seagram Building is the many different ways in which it reduces its vast scale to that of the pedestrian. In contrast to the many high-rise tower blocks built since then that offer nothing of benefit to the passer-by, this project created an urban space that continues to be used by the citizens of New York on a daily basis. 1 Phyllis Lambert, Building Seagram, New Haven, London 2013, p. 71. Phyllis Lambert, daughter of the client Samuel Bronfman, had proposed Mies as the architect and oversaw the project as director of planning. 2 Lambert 2013, p. 62. 3 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in conversation with Cameron Alread and others on 11 May 1960, cited in: Lambert 2013, p. 46. 4 Lambert 2013, pp. 122–123. 5 Ludwig Mies in conversation with Katharine Kuh, in: The Saturday Review, 23 Jan. 1965, p. 22. 6 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in: Moisés Puente (ed.), Conversations with Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona 2006, p. 81. 7 Philip Johnson in conversation with Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel (library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/dsva)
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Façade details Detail of the lift