Seagram Building

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe / Philip Johnson – Seagram Building, New York-USA, 1958

The Seagram Building is a New York skyscraper located at 375 Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in collaboration with the American Philip Johnson and completed in 1958. It is 156.9 meters high and has 38 floors. It represents one of the greatest examples of functionalism aesthetics and one of the main manifestations of the Modern Movement. It was designed as the headquarters of Canadian Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons distilleries, thanks to the foresight of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, general manager of the Seagram.
The interior of the building was designed to create a feeling of continuity with the visible structure of the external finishes in glass and bronze, all according to an architectural design, where the construction detail becomes an architectural detail, the rhythm, the proportion, between the elements tend to seek harmony, as in an ancient Greek temple. It is functionalism taken to the extreme where someone has recognized hints of Neoclassicism.
But the Seagram building itself had an enormous influence on American architecture and on the Modern Movement as a whole, of which this building could be considered together with a few others as an excellent example. One of the main characteristics of the style is the structure outside the building: the structural elements, according to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's thought, had to be visible. The Seagram Building, like most of the buildings of the time, consisted of a skeleton structure in load-bearing steel, on which the glass panels with external closure were hung (the so-called "curtain wall" system)…Wikipedia…>>