How a Building Gets Built

How a Building Gets Built

In this account of the search for an architect and the beginnings of a building, I have resorted to a number of letters that I wrote at the time. After four years of devotion to a skyscraper it is impossible to recapture the freshness and excitement of first discovery, but the letters do convey something of my reactions to the infinite complexity of the problems as I first encountered them. First I would like to give the background pertinent to the Seagram building and to my role in its creation.

I have always been interested in painting and sculpture but my concern with architecture and plunging into situations without formal training began at Vassar. The opportunity to plunge and tackle what would normally be considered professional problems was, I think, Vassar's greatest contribution to me. There was, for instance, the Arts Conference which we undertook and organized in nineteen forty-seven. It was Eve Borsook forty-nine who talked us into an exhibition on the relation of painting and sculpture to the buildings we live in and the objects we use. This was my first contact with modern architecture and E.B. has remained an inspiration. As a matter of fact, a significant number of Vassar names appear in this story. It was only after graduation, when the Seagram company acquired the Park Avenue site that I studied the history of architecture with Dr. Richard Krautheimer, formerly of Vassar, who was by then at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Post War Building

The new buildings that mushroomed with the post war boom in New York were a dismal lot. Demand for office space was tremendous and office buildings moved up town to Park Avenue. No thought was given to the meaning of a city nor to the men who lived in it. With the need for more space, the old zoning law which regulated the height and placement of buildings on Park Avenue was broken. Instead of rising twenty stories clean from the street, the new structures were allowed to zigzag back, with a tower twenty-five percent the size of the property sticking up out of a wedding cake base. Buildings were no longer really built; rather full-scale models of set-back zoning laws appeared, covered by cheap metal and glass curtain walls.

But a building cannot be ignored as a painting can be passed by, or a book left unread. It imposes itself on us, for we must approach it, find our way into it and through it, be enveloped by it. It is a visual and kinetic experience. As we approach a building, we are aware of its size and mass. Our eye is delighted or repelled by the proportions of the whole, its parts, its details. We are conscious of the materials we pass and step on, the space the building creates inside and out. These spatial intangibles, as well as the materials and detailing, have a direct influence on human beings, for we have a reaction to them, conscious or not.

The responsibility for superior planning and painstaking detail required to make a building pleasing to the eye and spirit, and eminently habitable, would appear to fall solely on the architect. But the moment business organizations and institutions decide to build, they claim responsibility and take a moral position; and upon the choice of architect depends the quality of the statement.

Usually these institutions, occupied with their own business, are content to have a real estate developer take over these infinitely complicated building problems and affix their name to the resulting skyscraper. If they do not buy a ready-made package, how are they to choose the architect? In the middle fifties the few masters of modern architecture were generally unknown. Modern architecture was viewed with suspicion if considered at all. With one or two exceptions the new ziggurats were being designed by huge architectural firms who, thanks to their stereotyped thinking, were the undisputed leaders in the number of square feet built.

In nineteen fifty-four Joseph E. Seagram and Sons at last decided to build on Park Avenue. I was living in Europe when Seagram's intent to build reached me in Paris in July through a rendering of a very mediocre building. I flew to New York and started to learn all I could about the good buildings built since the war, and I consulted with architectural critics. I felt that my task was to explain to my father, the president of the company, what the business's responsibility could mean in terms of architecture and to convince him of the validity of the new architectural thinking that started to mature in the twenties.