On Lever House
As far as SOM was concerned, Lever House started with a consulting management engineer who lived in Chicago, a casual friend of Nat Owings. This engineer told Nat that the Lever Company, which had its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was thinking of moving to Chicago and building a headquarters building. I'm not sure if he knew then, but I think he gave the impression that the site was diagonally across from the Drake Hotel. The engineer... offered to take Nat to meet Mr. Charles Luckman, who was then head of the company. I guess they got along. The next thing that happened, Luckman decided to come to New York and they acquired the site where the building is now. That land belongs to the Goelet family. Luckman asked Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to meet him at his apartment in the Waldorf Towers to discuss the possibility of doing a building. Skid and Nat took me along. I don't know why they took me, but I didn't say a damn thing in the meeting. In that meeting, Owings and Skidmore did all the talking, and Luckman offered the job of doing an office building for a thousand people, and said it should be a distinguished building. Of course, the firm wanted it very much and Luckman knew it. He offered a fee that was much lower than it should have been, but Skidmore and Nat accepted it. He also made it a condition that Raymond Loewy would do the interiors. That's how we got the job.
The first thing you do on a site is find out the zoning limitations, the air space you can't intrude on, and how big a building you could build on that site. The tower allowance in those days meant that you could go up only 85 feet on the side streets. On an avenue, you could go up to the equivalent of about ten or twelve floors, and then set back. If you wanted a tower above that, it could only be 25 percent of the site.
There were certain air slopes. We wanted to build a glass building. We wanted to be as avant-garde as possible. Twenty-five percent of the site produced a floor of 75 hundred square feet. In those days, the big floors weren't thought big, but this was small even then. The whole site produced about 30 thousand, and we had a hole in it for the big floor. Of course, we wanted something new, so we put it on stilts. Now, the location of the tower from left to right, as you face it from Park Avenue, is set by the zoning. We couldn't have moved it farther north aesthetically because of the envelope. We could have moved it maybe to the middle, but we wanted to have asymmetry. So that's how it developed. When they said they needed two big floors, we tried that and it was awful. That's the one time we tried to talk them out of something. That's how it came about.
Luckman wanted a building to identify Lever. They were not interested in making bucks out of stores or renting extra space. We showed him the model and he liked it. Then a few days later he came back for another meeting. Skid in the meantime said to me, "You'll never get away without stores. It's crazy." I said, "Well, it's the whole goddamn design." He said, "You've got to put in stores,' so I put them in and Luckman came over. Here's his only contribution. He said, "What happened to it? What's that stuff in the bottom, Skidmore?" Skid said, "Stores. You've got to have them." Luckman said, "You've ruined the whole design." If he'd have gone along with that, the building would have been nothing.
At MIT there was an old French professor, the head man, who said there were three important things about doing a building. There is, one, getting the job, two, getting the job, and, three, getting the job. So Owings has that credit. He got the job. The second one is Luckman for throwing out Skid's idea of putting stores in, which some clients would have insisted on to make money. And third was my design assistant, Manny Turano. He made some beautiful drawings of the proportions and the mullion system. The fourth was, of course, all through this, Bill Brown. We worked together. Bill headed up the research to build the glass skin. It's rather primitive compared to what we can do today. It forced the glass industry to develop a spandrel glass and to design an outside window washer that worked. That was the first real one in the world. Bill Brown was the main person that handled the whole project jointly with me. That's about as close as I can come to the whole story.
Oh, I thought I was in seventh heaven that we did it. As far as I'm concerned, that was the first real building. I don't consider an apartment house made out of bricks, like Manhattan House, to be a great building. Lever was the first really contemporary building, the first major one.
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