ABSTRACT
The Seagram, a 40-story slab skyscraper of amber glass within a grid of bronze I beams, rises above a fountained plaza on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. The body of the building, in typical Mies fashion, is supported by a templelike entry that is reminiscent, within a thoroughly modern composition, of the earliest post-and-lintel roots of archaic architecture. The design is of interest not only for the glass slab that rises suavely above mid-town Manhattan but also for the invention of the plaza fronting Park Avenue and the resulting relationship of urban architectural object to its opposition, void space, within the city grid. Architectural historian William H.Jordy, in his definitive analysis of the building, spoke of the Seagram as modern expression of “the potential of structure to create noble order, in the sense in which it created noble order in the past” coupled with “truth of its time.”
