Architecture of
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1950 - 1962
Introduction
To the foreign visitor arriving in America by ship the first sight of the New World will perhaps always remain the most impressive – the incredible mountain range of towers rising at the tip of Manhattan Island. This man-made wonder, since early in our century, has more than rivalled such natural sights as Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. It is often forgotten, however, that this climactic 20th-century image of the City of Man had already reached completion by the time skyscraper building came to a stop in the early 1930's.
Now, a generation later, something new has been added. Up among the serrated spires of the 'teens and the 'twenties has appeared the top of a plain rectangular slab, realistic where they are fantastic, yet almost transparent thanks to the extent of the fenestration. Even from a great distance the sturdy steel skeleton, expressed in external piers, and even the storeyed interior of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Chase Manhattan Bank are clearly visible, while the older skyscrapers appear solid and without structural articulation owing to their massive brick and stone cladding. Thus this new skyscraper boldly announces, in the midst of the greatest accumulation anywhere of large-scale American architecture of the first half of this century, that we are now well into the century's second half and that the aspirations of our current magnates are very different from those of the Woolworth who erected a "Cathedral of Commerce" half a century ago.
Nor is this announcement belied if the visitor proceeds uptown or to other major American cities. If he knew the Park Avenue of the dozen blocks above 46th Street as it was before 1950 he will hardly recognize the scene. Of the older landmarks, St. Bartholomew's, several hotels, the Racquet Club, and two skyscrapers, the Ritz Tower and the Grand Central Building – soon to be out-topped by the Pan-American Building behind it – survive. But almost without exception the solid brick and stone surfaces of the heavy blocks of the 'teens and 'twenties have been replaced by glazed curtain walls – in several cases literally so, since the old internal structure has been retained.
If the visitor has the curiosity to ask, he will soon learn that this change began in 1951 with the construction of Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the first example of a tall curtain-walled business building. It should be noted at once, however – although this will be considered in more detail later – that the work and projects illustrated in this present book, covering the production of the firm since 1950, give evidence that the designers have since contributed to various other post-war technical and stylistic lines of development. It is nonetheless true that in the main the work of SOM in the 1950's and earliest 1960's has followed the line initiated with Lever House at the opening of the former decade; and the continued acceptability of such work to architects and to clients, not only in America but abroad as well, is proved by the frequency of its emulation. "Lever House" has become a familiar term to describe the curtain-walled slab-skyscrapers which have by now risen all over the Western World.
Although SOM had completed or nearly completed several large individual projects by 1950 – Manhattan House in New York (in association with Mayer & Whittlesey), the Terrace-Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, and the Brooklyn Veterans Administration Hospital – not to speak of a considerable volume of varied construction in the wartime "new town" of Oak Ridge, it was their Lever House on its conspicuous site in midtown New York that made the reputation of SOM. Already, moreover, the Museum of Modern Art had presented, in the autumn of 1950 an SOM exhibition – its first to show the work of a firm rather than of an individual or a dual partnership – in which the model of Lever House was the most striking single exhibit.
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