CIAM 1928-1959
Figure 4, 5 Sketches of Park Avenue before and after Lever House.
and functionality. In the book The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, Mumford writes “aspects of the CIAM agenda were appropriated for the populist, consumer oriented modernism of the 1939 New York Worlds fair.. CIAM like approaches in the service of a urbanistic vision of remade American downtowns served by highways”6. In the 1940’s, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design hired CIAM member Walter Gropius as chair of the department of archietcure, “a post from which he promulgated the functionalist ideas developed in the German Neues Bauen movement and the CIAM network generally”7. The conception of Lever House thus stood at a time when American attitudes with regards to city building were shifting, and the embrace of a new modern “international” style of architecture became ubiquitous, especially amongst American Corporations. A CIAM AESTHETIC FOR AMERICAN CORPORATISM With the exception of the UN Headquarters building (1947) by Le Corbusier and other CIAM affiliated architects, it was corporations that first adopted the modernist, “International Style” aesthetic for their new corporate office towers in Manhattan. This style of 132
building was intrinsically rooted in CIAM ideals, but stripped void of political and intellectual meaning for American consumption. A 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York showcased the International Style but “stripped the European movement of its radical manifestos to present it as pure abstraction.. Ironically for an aesthetic once steeped in revolutionary rhetoric, corporate America adopted the mantle of modernism ”7. Lever House became the first corporate office tower in New York built in the International Style, and, as a by-product of the city’s 1916 zoning resolution, it displayed many tenets of CIAM ideals in its manifestation. Perhaps most notably, the Lever house features a 22 storey tower that floats above a public plaza at ground level,
Figure 6 Figure Ground Diagram Post Lever House