That SOM's architecture, beginning particularly with Lever House, is generically Miesian, is a widely accepted but by no means accurate proposition. They were certainly not especially Miesian in their earliest years of production; before 1950 their approach to design was closer, perhaps, to that of Gropius. Their type of organization, with its emphasis on anonymous production by teams of co-workers, is certainly so although it was not derived from the pattern of practice Gropius had long called for and finally achieved with TAC. And it is a serious error to consider Lever House itself as Miesian. Mies had been the first, of course, thirty years earlier in his Glass Skyscraper projects for Berlin of 1919 and 1921, to propose tall towers sheathed with glazed curtain walls; and in his Alexanderplatz project of 1928 he had substituted plain rectangular slabs for the contorted plan-shapes of his Expressionist period. Furthermore, one of Mies's early projects of 1946 for the Promontory Apartments in Chicago, ultimately executed with concrete piers projecting beyond the wall-plane, had shown a continuous curtain wall of glass held outside the structural skeleton by projecting vertical mullions of metal such as he was finally to use on the Seagram Building a decade later.
The immediate analogy was with two more nearly current buildings on which, not Mies, but Le Corbusier had served as consultant: Costa and Niemeyer's Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro of 1937-43 and Harrison's U.N. Secretariat, the latter just reaching completion right in New York in 1950.
Credit for the more original aspects of Lever House – those that assured it would be epochmaking – belongs properly to SOM and also, presumably, in part to their clients. The isolation of the curtain-walled slab in an area otherwise built up with brick-walled skyscrapers of set-back silhouette – isolation made possible by confining the tower to 25% of the property and leaving the rest of the site free beneath a raised open square at mezzanine level – represented the opening of a new period of skyscraper design, not only for New York but throughout the Western World.
But Lever House was something more than that – it would have been striking in any setting. The lightness of effect produced by the rather delicate scale and the transparency of the continuous cladding had been approached long before this – in some Chicago buildings of the 1890's and again in the studio block of the Bauhaus in the mid-twenties – but never with skyscraper dimensions. Nor was the external expression arbitrary; it expressed very clearly the new character of large-scale office-building organization and planning, with unobstructed floor-spaces artificially air-conditioned for physical comfort and artificially lighted all day to balance, in the relatively deep interiors, the natural light from the glazed walls. Thus it opened both esthetically and technically a new stage in the design of office buildings over and above the novelty of its open handling of an expensive site.
The somewhat Corbusian character of SOM's work in these early years of the 50's is further evident in the Istanbul Hilton Hotel in Turkey, designed in 1951 and opened in 1955; for that is raised on concrete pilotis, faced with box-like balconies, and capped with shaped equipment housings and a domed nightclub. By the time the Istanbul Hilton was underway, however, a much more modest and less publicized group of buildings, erected for the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California, in 1952-55, was illustrating with what success a vocabulary close to that of Mies's work of the 40's at the Illinois Institute of Technology could be mastered and applied by SOM's designers and technicians. Indeed, thanks to the happy relationship of the industrially-detailed but elegantly executed ferroconcrete pavilions there to the lush foliage of the setting, the total effect is perhaps superior to that of Mies's predominantly steel-framed buildings on their gaunt Chicago campus.
If this and the U.S. Consulate in Dusseldorf, commissioned in 1952 and built 1954-55, represent the most paradigmatic examples of Miesian work by SOM, standards of detailing, not unworthy of Mies both in the handling of external structural elements and of interior finish, have ever since been maintained by the firm in almost all its work. This is true not only of their large office buildings in and out of cities such as Inland Steel in Chicago, designed in 1954-55 and built 1956-58, or Connecticut General in Bloomfield, Connecticut, commissioned a year earlier and built 1954-57, but in work at all hierarchical levels (if one may so put it) from the frankly industrial Central Heating Plant at the Idlewild Airport of 1957-58 to the monumental Air Force Academy outside Colorado Springs, commissioned in 1954, begun in 1956 and, only now that the chapel is finished, at last completed in 1962.
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