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515 feet tall, while tinted plate glass, also
at full height, ran between the beams. At
each floor, skinny metal spandrel panels
were placed horizontally to shroud the
components that lay beneath.
Unprecedented at the time—and still
glamorous and efficient 65 years later—
Mies planted a seamless 38 floors on
Park Avenue in a perfect expression of the
International Style. One can mentally time-
travel to when such forms never existed
to grasp the curious feeling of discovery
one would feel when faced with the vision
of the Seagram Building for the first time;
much like in 1908 spotting a brand-new
Ford Model A speed by while still plodding
along on horse and buggy.
Consistent with the radical innovation of
lone, logic will not make
beauty inevitable," architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
told LIFE in 1957. "But with
logic, a building shines." And
in his case, revolutionarily
so. Perhaps no one better
understood how to positively exploit the
potential of technology and engineering
than van der Rohe, a founding father of
Modernist architecture who was central to
the Great Age of the Skyscraper during the
1950s and 1960s—a time when many city
landscapes would shift from horizontal to
vertical.
His most famous commission was the
Seagram Building (1958), a lean NYC
tower famously sheathed in a bronze-and-
glass curtain wall system—a singular Mies
innovation that would usher in a new, prism-
like look to high-rise buildings. It was a first
on many fronts: A series of bronze I-beams
spanned the full height of the building, at
From left. Photo of Mies van der Rohe. Credit: By Hugo Erfurth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. In center, A rare residential project by Mies, the famous Edith Farnsworth House, completed in
1951. Credit: By Victor Grigas, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode. Inset, Part of Mies' Five Famous Projects—a curvilinear glass skyscraper project, 1922
(Image of the lost model at MOMA). • Credit: Photo by Art is a Word, Public domain, via Creative Commons.
26 DIGS.NET
| 10.6.23
