lever house (1950)
No building is more closely identified with SOM (Skidmore Owings & Merrill) than Lever House.It was, and remains more than fifty years after its completion, the building on which a significant portion of their early reputation is founded.
It was built for Lever Brothers, the American arm of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, a manufacturer of cleaning products. Charles Luckman (left) trained as an architect was appointed to head Lever Brothers. When he moved the headquarters from Massachusetts to New York City, he appointed Gordon Bunshaft (right) and SOM as the new headquarters' architects.
"The building of tomorrow which promises to set the pattern for the city of tomorrow" SOM solicited testimonial opinions from well-known architects to bolster the building's impact.
When Luckman hired SOM, he expressed his vision of the building in negatives.
From his autobiography:
"I did not want the building to use all the square footage allowed by the city's building codes. I did not want tenants in the new building: it was to house Lever and only Lever. Let's design the building with materials that emphasize the most modern American technology. I do not want a bank or shops or anything else on the street level. I want pedastrians to be able to walk through open garden on Park Avenue and into the glass-enclosed lobby of the building and to feel that Lever Brothers is saying 'Welcome' to all the people"
Lever House did not take over all of Owings' ideas about an "ideal" office tower. Retail shops were not included at the sidewalk level because surveys showed that Park Avenue was not an active shopping street and that the income could not justify the capital investment.
The first plan from the left shows the street level.Although this sounded like a wasteful investment, what convinced the Unilever was the possibility of "millions and millions of dollars of free advertising for Lever Brothers". In this respect, few buildings have ever returned results to their investors so handsomely.
The most impressive of the gadgets at Lever House was the electronically powered window washing machine hanging from the roof. Two men could wash the entire building in six days! Lever justified it as an economy and as a demostration of Lever products. In a "Fact Sheet" circulated in 1952 public relations officials wrote:"The conventional building materials, stone and brick, gather grime, soot and soil and give them up grudgingly and expensively. On the other hand, glass comes clean in seconds. So Lever House was built of glass and stainless steel, also readily cleaned. For years Lever Brothers laboratory men have dedicated their research to getting things clean quickly and economically. This economical principle for washing not only the windows but the entire outside of the building had never been used before"
Although Lever House earned excellent returns on its inverstment in terms of publicity, the building did not use space economically. Over the years, as the benefits of publicity decreased and the value of Park Avenue real estate increased, there were proposals for its alteration and even for its demolition.
In the early flush of post-modernist sarcasm the critic Charles Jencks dismissed Lever House as "background wallpaper and businessman's vernacular" Landmark designation in 1983 ensured it's survival.
