Seagram Building

Mies van der Rohe’s skyscraper on Park Avenue stands set back behind an open plaza. The façade is a grid of bronze mullions and brown glass, and the whole building is constructed with the same care for detail. It became the model for the office tower all over the world.

Samuel Bronfman, owner of the distillers Seagram, at first wanted a more ordinary building, but his daughter, the architect Phyllis Lambert, persuaded him to hire Mies van der Rohe. The building went up in 1954–1958, and by setting it back from the street and leaving a plaza the company gave up lettable space to give the city a public space.

Mies wanted the structure to be visible, but fire regulations required the steel to be encased in concrete. Instead he fixed bronze profiles to the outside, which express the structure symbolically. The building was so influential that New York changed its zoning rules in 1961 to reward plazas at the foot of towers. The Seagram Building is the high point of the International Style and has been called the most important office building of the 20th century.

• Post-war modernism
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
• Philip Johnson