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Newspaper Article
For Great Buildings, Get a Great Client
2002
Overview
The architect Cass Gilbert's combination of forceful vertical thrust and aerie filigree, in shimmering terra cotta, is indeed masterful. The glittering marble and mosaic lobby evokes medieval cathedrals. Yet the faces staring down from the ribbed vaults are not of saints but the decision-makers behind this feat built on America's nickels and dimes. Along with the engineer and rental agent are portraits of Gilbert and Frank Woolworth -- a great architect and a great client. In intensive exchanges with Woolworth, Gilbert found a new way of relating street scale and skyscape and a series of refinements to his ornamental vocabulary. The dynamic between the two minted architectural gold from that spare change. For even an architect mining a design vision desires the creative tension produced by a strong client. Just such a client enabled [Mies] van der Rohe to bring the experiments with the form and materials of the steel frame that had preoccupied him for decades to a level of perfection never surpassed. In 1954, Samuel Bronfman, chairman of Seagram's, was planning an office tower on Park Avenue when his daughter Phyllis Lambert persuaded him to jettison an unmemorable design by one of the era's productive commercial firms in favor of a bid to realize a landmark worth of his efforts. Ms. Lambert recalled that Bronfman had to be brought around to accepting the building's lofty glazed base: Mies insisted that Bronfman lean down to the pedestrian's level to see on the model just how beautiful the effect would be of entering a glazed void under a lofty tower, especially when it was encountered on a plaza that broke the great line of Park Avenue's masonry cliff face. But it was Bronfman, by saying he wanted a warmer color and effect than Mies's Chicago apartment buildings, who inspired Mies to use the tawny bronze mullions that are the trademark of the Seagram Building's classical serenity and reserve.
Publisher
New York Times Company
