"The Seagram building rises over New York's Park Avenue, seeming to float above the street with perfect lines of bronze and glass. Considered one of the greatest icons of twentieth-century architecture, the building was commissioned by Samuel...
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"The Seagram building rises over New York's Park Avenue, seeming to float above the street with perfect lines of bronze and glass. Considered one of the greatest icons of twentieth-century architecture, the building was commissioned by Samuel Bronfman, founder of the Canadian distillery dynasty Seagram. Bronfman's daughter Phyllis Lambert was twenty-seven years old when she took over the search for an architect and chose Mies van der Rohe (18861969), a pioneering modern master of what he termed "skin and bones" architecture. Mies, who designed the elegant, deceptively simple thirty-eight-story tower along with Philip Johnson (19062005), emphasized the beauty of structure and fine materials, and set the building back from the avenue, creating an urban oasis with the building's plaza. Through her choice, Lambert established her role as a leading architectural patron and singlehandedly changed the face of American urban architecture. Building Seagram is a comprehensive personal and scholarly history of a major building and its architectural, cultural, and urban legacies. Lambert makes use of previously unpublished personal archives, company correspondence, and photographs to tell an insider's view of the debates, resolutions, and unknown dramas of the building's construction, as well as its crucial role in the history of modern art and architectural culture."--Publisher description
Foreword / Barry BergdollPrologue. Unlikely convergences
A site and an architect for Seagram ; Mies van der Rohe's Ur-Building ; Richard Pare : plaza studies, 2000 and 2010 ; Union of building and plaza in the urban landscape ; Light : Philip Johnson's Stimmung ; Architecture and art allied ; Ironies in public life of architecture : regulation and the modern metropolis ; Sustaining architectural culture ; Epilogue. Changing hands Appendixes. 1. Phyllis Lambert to Samuel Bronfman, June 28, 1954 ; 2. Seagram Plaza installations and Seagram Gallery exhibitions ; 3. Some conservation issues as remembered by Arvid Klein and Tom Stetz of Pasanella + Klein.
