Seagram Building Influence On American Architecture

The iconic Seagram Building stands 515 feet tall with 38 stories and was completed in 1958. Since its construction, it has remained one of the finest examples of the functionalist aesthetic and corporate modernism. Designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the style of the Seagram Building has had a pivotal influence on American architecture. The style argued that the functional utility of the building’s structural elements when made visible, could supercede the formal decorative; and more easily convey its beauty to a lay public than any system of applied ornamentation.

The Seagram Building, like virtually all large skyscrapers of the era, was steel frame, from which non-structural glass walls were hung. Concrete surrounded the structure of the building — something that caused

One aspect of a façade which Mies disliked was the disordered irregularity when window blinds are drawn. Inevitably, people using different windows will draw blinds to different heights, making the building appear disorganized. To reduce this disproportionate appearance, Mies specified window blinds which only operated in three positions – fully open, halfway open/closed, or fully closed.

Flaunting its glass and metal, and foregoing the heavy stone and brick used in ornamental facades of previous decades, the Seagram Building helped usher in a new era of simple, straightforward skyscrapers – buildings that embraced and celebrated their structures and minimalist geometries, rather than camouflaging them with superfluous ornament and detail.

While the building itself stands as an icon of modernism, the empty space in front of the building was also innovative. An open, urban plaza set the building back from Park Avenue and created a gracious pedestrian space. Often emulated, such plazas have become a cliché, but, at the time, Mies was as at the forefront of radical