The Seagram building rises over New York’s Park Avenue, seeming to float above the street with perfect lines of bronze and glass. Considered one of the greatest icons of twentieth-century architecture, the building was commissioned by Samuel Bronfman, founder of the Canadian distillery dynasty Seagram. Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis Lambert was twenty-seven years old when she took over the search for an architect and chose Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), a pioneering modern master of what he termed ‘skin and bones’ architecture. Mies, who designed the elegant, deceptively simple thirty-eight-story tower along with Philip Johnson (1906–2005), emphasized the beauty of structure and fine materials, and set the building back from the avenue, creating an urban oasis with the building’s plaza. Through her choice, Lambert established her role as a leading architectural patron and single-handedly changed the face of American urban architecture.

Below is an excerpt from Building Seagram, by Phyllis Lambert:

Phyllis Lambert—

Looking at the past through the eyes of the present, it might be assumed that the commissioning, design, and construction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building were politically driven by the world of power and intrigue. In face, Building Seagram is not a story of architectural or corporate power plays but rather one of unlikely convergences, extraordinary coincidences, and ironic turns. In 1951, when the building project got under way. my father, Samuel Bronfman, whom I still refer to as SB, the ‘client’, de jure, was still effectively an outsider in New York, Mies was living in Chicago, and I was working as an artist in Paris. Only Philip Johnson, through his longtime position as director of the Department of Architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, was any sort of powerful figure in New York City at the time. Real estate development, on the threshold of a postwar boom, did not yet wield the influence that it would eventually assume. Though it is difficult to comprehend today, architecture itself was generally considered to be little more than a commercial product at the beginning of the 1950s.

This book is based on my involvement with the Seagram building from its beginnings – identifying the architect, serving as director of planning and, in effect, as ‘client’ from 1954 to 1959, building the company’s collections, and continuing to be involved with the maintenance and stewardship of the building as well as the artworks and programs through the end of the twentieth century. It is a personal account of how Mies designed the Seagram building as well as Philip Johnson’s role, both as I experienced the process at the time and as I see it now, some fifty years later. Ultimately, it is very much about the life of the building in the city. This post-World War II phenomenon is seen against and within the coming of age of architecture and the arts in New York, transformations from war technology to building construction, the first real changes in zoning regulations in New York City, the evolution of real estate from individual practices to a highly structured and influential industry in the city, and the onset of legislation aimed at sustaining the urban fabric.

[...]

The story of Building Seagram offers insight into the arcana of commissioning buildings  in New York City after World War II. In this volume I have sought to explain in some detail Mies’s approach to building - Baukunst, he called it, the building art. This encompasses the questions he posed about the time he lived in, the logical, the less than logical, and the spiritual, as well as the instances of his auto-generative process. Rising prominently on park Avenue, New York’s broadest and most majestic street, Seagram was immediately perceived as the great exemplar of the prototypical American building type. What industry and lesser architects learned from it was not its exemplary form and proportions, not its refined details, not its astute siting (which changed the concept of public space in New York City), but the idea of the glass and metal curtain wall, which was roughly copied and deployed in countless buildings insensitive to site, context, or proportion, and, one must say, far removed from the philosophical and cultural foundations of the art of architecture in which Mies was immersed. Like all, or almost all, of the buildings Mies forged, the Seagram tower was bound to an open platform forming a podium establishing a vista and an oasis in the grid of the busy city. Mies had explored the spatial interrelationship of building and landscape from his first built work in the first decade of the twentieth century. The glass towers he drew in the early 1920s as revolutionary manifestos remained theoretical for forty years, until the circumstance materialized in which they could be built. However, neither his low rise structures nor his towers were entities in themselves. Rather, each was resolved as a union of house and garden or building and plaza, as elements bound together to become clearings in the ‘forest’ of the city. In looking back at the birth and life of the Seagram building, it is not enough to recount what happened, as complex and compelling as that might be: It is also necessary to examine the unfolding of Mies’s course in architecture, the evolution of his ideas over half a century, from his independent building of the 1909 to the completion of Seagram and its plaza in 1958. Similarly, it is necessary to revisit Philip Johnson’s Glass House to understand his contribution to the building. It is equally vital to consider the impact of the Seagram building in the public realm of the city over the next fifty years, from 1959 through the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the Seagram company ceased to exist.

Excerpted from Building Seagram, by Phyllis Lambert, available now from Yale University Press. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved.

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The perfect way to check architectural terms when you are out and about, exploring buildings.

Just in time for National Landscape Architecture month, Yale University Press is pleased to announce the release of Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary app. Based on the 2010 publication of Pevsner’s Architectural Glossary, this iOS app will allow users to interactively engage with Pevsner’s vocabulary and knowledge base. With a glossary of architectural terms, explanatory line drawings, specific building maps, and beautiful color images, the app will allow both beginner students and expect scholars to explore Pevsner’s masterful understanding of the field.

Sally Salvesen, publisher of the Pevsner Guide Series said of the app, “This vocabulary is absolutely central to Pevsner’s famous survey of British architecture and the Glossary book has shown how keen people are to engage with it. We are excited to be taking this first step in digitizing Pevsner content…”

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83), one of the most learned and stimulating twentieth-century writers on art and architecture, began his career in Germany. He later became Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck College (University of London), Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and a Gold Medallist of the Royal Institute of British Architects. In addition to The Buildings of England, first published from 1951 to 1974, he was founding editor of The Pelican History of Art and of The Buildings of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Among his many publications are An Outline of European Architecture, Pioneers of Modern Design and A History of Building Types. See all available titles from the Pevsner Architectural Guides here.

With a storied history, New Haven is the site of both the affluent Yale University as well as significant poverty. This city makes a fascinating case study for examining urban development and decline. In City: Urbanism and Its End, Douglas W. Rae, Richard Ely Professor of Management and professor political science at Yale, explores New Haven’s urban life and in doing so illuminates urban vitality and decline more generally.

Particularly in the 19^th century, unexpected and unplanned events such as immigration patterns, transportation development, and shifts in industry and energy came together to form the character of city-life in the United States. Rae notes, “there was nothing inevitable or even predictable about this temporary historical alignment: if God, or nature, should elect to run the same history a thousand times, there is no particularly good reason to expect that the same alignment would recur very often, or at all.” Rae describes how economic, political and social factors came together in America’s newly industrialized cities to form “urbanism.” City describes how these elements slowly and unevenly eroded within that concentrated city space, which he understands as the end of urbanism.

Within this decline, city officials were faced with the task of managing and revitalizing New Haven. Rae gives a fascinating account for these efforts and the personalities of those involved, like Mayor Richard Lee and his administration in the 1950s and ‘60s whom Rae calls “the smartest and most arrogant people who had ever served in the management of so modest an American city.”

Rae brings out the way cities live or die based on incremental shifts over time. “Downward-sloping change in a city typically unfolds without a big bang, without an eruption that makes headlines,” he explains, “but instead by the rapid accumulation of small changes.” These changes are hard to undo as well. Rae explains, “Cities are among the least agile creatures in America’s system of capitalist democracy – they most slowly, reactively, and awkwardly in response to change initiated by more athletic organizations.”

As suburbs grew, expectations and experiences of the city changed too. Commuters on their way to work approached its limits at certain times of day, which Rae describes in appealing prose: “Morning was for the city — its noise, its traffic, its strangers, its cash.”

Any city develops its character from disparate and complicated pressures. Rae paints a picture that is rich in detail and expertise from factors as varied as the inner-workings of municipal government, to the influence of the burgeoning railroad, to the development of capitalist enterprise. In doing this he illustrates not only the history of one city, but both the small and sweeping ways any urban centre is shaped.

In his final chapter, while laying out the factors the city could not control, the author suggests opportunities for action. Rae quotes Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale University:

Human beings made and make cities, and only human beings kill cities, or let them die. And human beings do both – make cities and unmake them – by the same means: by acts of choice.

At first glance The Cloisters might be seen as an anachronism to its northern Manhattan neighborhood. Nestled within Fort Tryon Park (opened 1935), sitting above a grid of 1920s low-rise apartments, 1950s high-rise housing projects and the requisite array of fast food franchises, parking garages, and bodegas that dot the city, The Cloisters brings a decidedly Medieval feel to the neighborhood. This is not surprising; much of the building predates its neighboring structures by several centuries. A branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the renowned collection of European art and architecture, including the famed Unicorn Tapestries, is housed in an elegant stone structure that combines a little bit of 12^th-century France here, a little bit of 11^th-century Spain there, and some Belgian cobblestones (extracted from lower Manhattan) and Connecticut granite added during the 1930s for good measure.

The Cloisters is truly the sum of its parts, a series of attractions that is as likely to be a wall hanging as the wall itself. What makes this so fascinating, beyond the pleasure of proximity to so many artistic and architectural treasures, is that these paintings, tapestries, ceramics, and sculptures, not to mention arches, courtyards, and apses, tell a story not simply of the European Middle Ages, but  of the brisk trade in medieval artifacts that flourished at the turn of the 20^th century. As Nancy Wu and Peter Barnet note the in their introduction to a newly revised and expanded guide to the collection, the history of The Cloisters begins with George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor who lived in rural France with his family between 1905-1913. At that time, ruins and relics of the Middle Ages were easily available to those with the interest and means to acquire them. Over centuries many of these objects had been uprooted from their original contexts by war, looting, and architectural renovations; some structures that once served ecclesiastical purposes were put to decidedly mundane use storing livestock and farming equipment. Barnard, who had a longstanding fascination with medieval stonework, was able to build an impressive collection which he shipped to New York just before the French senate passed a law impeding such exports.

Barnard’s collection, originally on display at 698 Fort Washington Avenue in Washington Heights, was purchased for The Metropolitan Museum of Art by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1925 and continued to expand through new acquisitions over the subsequent decade. In the late 1930s new galleries were built for collection in Fort Tryon Park, an Olmsted brothers-designed space commissioned by Rockefeller and donated to the city. The updated structure combined contemporary construction modeled after various European medieval monuments, with several historical elements from France, including a chapter house from an abbey in Pontaut that had most recently served as a stable, a 13^th century doorway from Burgundy that had been refitted for a barn, and 12^th century chapel that had been put to use during the 19^th century as a stable, dance hall, theater, and finally as a storage space for tobacco. Barnet and Wu’s guide gives readers and museum-goers detailed biographies of these elements, often with images of the pieces in their original, re-purposed contexts. The result is a rich history of how a museum collection is built. Such an in-depth story of architectural refurbishment and innovation, coupled with close readings of key pieces from the collection, makes the guide an invaluable insight into the art and culture of the Middle Ages and tells a truly enchanting slice of New York City history.

In 1929, she returned to New York from Paris and, as she would later report to a radio interviewer, “The minute I touched New York, I had a burning desire to photograph this city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same—New York.”

Many of Abbott’s visually arresting New York images are gathered in the recently-published catalogue Berenice Abbott, edited by Gaëlle Morel, which accompanies an exhibition currently on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  We’ve been particularly captivated, though, by the work in a subsequent group of photographs, collectively known as Abbott’s “scientific photography.”  Abbott herself considered these some of her most “realistic” work.  In 1946, Abbott wrote, “To me photography is a means, perhaps the best means of our age—of widening knowledge of our world.  Photography is a method of education, for acquainting people of all ages and condition with the truth about life today.”  With birthday wishes and gratitude to Abbott for her contribution to the fields of photography and science, here is a brief slide show of some magnificent images that represent properties and phenomena of physics.

In 1940, Aalto set in motion a plan to build an experimental town meant to ease reconstruction efforts and help solve rehousing problems in Finland. During Aalto’s stay in America from March to October 1940, he put together an impressive network of support for the project, including leading universities and donors like the Rockefellers. MIT invited Aalto as a visiting professor in 1941 and provided support for the accumulation of knowledge and for a consortium shaped around this building project. Aalto stressed research, high quality, flexibility, and the chance to produce models that could also be applied elsewhere under similar circumstances. His vision was not limited to Finland; he anticipated the years of reconstruction in Europe that lay ahead and sought the technological advances and financial support he could find in America.

At MIT, Aalto conducted research and remotely monitored reconstruction back home. He examined the flexibility of standardization, the reactions of humans to various architectural elements, and established the surface areas of the planned housing. Central to Aalto’s research for this experimental town was the “human factor”—how can one accommodate psychological and social variables in an essentially serialized production plan?  Aalto and his research partners were attempting to avoid the usual results of emergency reconstruction: barrack-like shoddy construction and monotony.

Prefabricated wooden houses lay at the core of the whole plan, which called for 168 single houses, 3 units of terraced apartment houses, and possibly 3 additional units of row houses. The town would also include a community center, a school, an athletic field, and be favorably located relative to existing towns, industrial districts and agricultural centers. Even though the American Town in Finland plan was just beginning, Aalto was already well-versed in the mass-production of wooden one-family houses. He had executed such types in the late 1930s with his designs for the Finnish industrial communities of Sunila and Kauttua.

Although the research conducted by Aalto was never completed due to the unfolding of World War II, his American Town in Finland is a fascinating glimpse into the ideological factors that may have influenced Aalto’s decision to mediate such a project between Finland and America. Pekka Korvenmaa writes, “For many in Finland, the American model of societal and technological modernity combined with a democratic system highlighting the role of the individual had become, during the 1930s, a beacon in a world of increasing dictatorship.” He adds, “In Finland and in the United States, a democratic political system with high esteem for individual incentive provided the framework [of a modern infrastructure].” A failed project between the two nations was not lost, for Aalto’s legacy in America continues to unravel.

Caroline Hayes—

Venice from the water is a magnificent sight to behold. When people professed to me the beauty of the “floating city,” I imagined, in my pre-visit naivete, a city surrounded by harbors or beaches. On the night that I arrived in Venice, I was surprised to find neither harbors nor typical island beaches, only buildings right at the water’s edge. The doors of the beautiful Venetian palaces open right onto the lagoon, creating an island perimeter of buildings that seem without foundation—truly a floating city. The mythical, otherworldly environment described by Daniel Savoy in Venice From the Water was recognizable at once.

My place of residence was located in a deeply recessed alleyway off the Arsenale water taxi stop—a quiet and beautiful residential area on the eastern side of the city. Like many other tourists, I went straight for St. Mark’s Square. As I walked closer to the hub of tourism, I walked farther from the celestial city that had floated before me when I first arrived. The thousands of tourists, myself included, tramped along the canals and over the many Renaissance-built bridges, turning the magical city into one that seemed nearly overwhelmed by tourism. My concerns over issues of sustainability posed by so many visitors preceded thoughts of rising acqua alta levels.

In a city as touristy as Venice can seem, a proactive traveler needs to do a little extra work to experience the city’s Renaissance spirit. How could I access the majestic essence that the architects of Veniceso carefully planned? I regret that I did not visit Venice with prior knowledge of the city’s genesis and history; the floating city would have made an even deeper impression on me if I could have experienced the city with more knowledge of Venetian history.  Venice and Vitruvius and Venice From the Water, or Venice Disputed, Deborah Howard’s account of the democratic debates over civic building projects in Venice, or Howard and Laura Moretti’s beautiful book Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice, would have facilitated a travel back in time—a historical, intellectual departure from the often invasive buzz of tourism.

This is not to say that the modern spirit of Venice should be – or could be –  ignored. Armed with bloggers’ advice and architectural guides like Richard Goy’s Venice, I was prepared to experience Venetian contemporary art and culture. From the walks in the garden made famous for hosting the Venice Biennial, to the modern art exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim collection, to Venetian Spritz in the afternoon and amazing food at night, there is much to explore inVenice’s vibrant culture of the present.

Caroline Hayes is a summer intern in Yale University Press’s Art Workshop and a rising senior at New York University studying Comparative Literature.

Any examination of Venice must come to terms with questions of the city’s sustainability. It is no surprise that the city is undergoing serious restoration and Margaret Muther D’Evelyn’s preface to her book, Venice & Vitruvius explains the predicament:

Today the beauty and wonder remain, and yet things are not the same: the highest acqua alta levels in twenty years have been reported. New construction has raised small bridges and fondamente along the perimeter of the city, but the waters still come in.

Although this fundamental awareness is present in both publications, neither writer sounds the emergency alarm nor predicts the city’s demise. Actually, quite the opposite emerges. D’Evelyn’s work centers on the elaborate design project led by Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) who, during the design and construction of Venice, engaged in a comprehensive study of the writings of Vitruvius in order to build the city as foundationally sound as possible. The issue of sustainability was recognized by the architects and urban planners right from the beginning and played an enormous role in the city’s formation. Rather than a sense of terror at the rising tide levels, D’Evelyn reinforces the accomplishment of the Renaissance thinkers and architects that built Venice and the sustainability that they did, indeed, attain.

In Venice from the Water, David Savoy explains that a mythological impression of Venice was the desired effect of an elaborate system of urbanism. His book outlines the phantasmic rituals, palaces that appeared to float, and climactic revelations of monumental buildings that created the perception among waterborne visitors of an aquatic domain governed by supernatural phenomena. As a city to be seen from the water the Venetians may have attempted to reify the “myth of Venice:” that their city was a miraculous creation founded by God. In terms of sustainability, Savoy is here interested in the Venetian attempt to sustain a supernatural quality to their floating city. In this way, the sustainability efforts made by the architects of Venice were practical, as told by D’Evelyn, and also metaphoric.

Both before it was built and since, people have been boosting and bashing Boston’s Prudential Center, whose construction began in earnest fifty years ago. Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by architectural historian Elihu Rubin and published today by Yale University Press, captures and explains what the conversation has been about.

Here, Rubin offers some memorable remarks about the building from a variety of observers — politicians, architects, critics.  Each quote is followed by a bit of context, in boldface, courtesy of Rubin.

“We believe in Boston.  We believe in the entire New England area.”

-Prudential Insurance Company president Carrol Shanks in 1957, announcing plans to build the Prudential Center as its Northeastern Home Office. Despite its “belief in Boston,” the Prudential suspended the project in midstream and didn’t resume it until it succeeded in getting a major tax break, based on new state legislation and a Supreme Judicial Court decision that building the Pru over an old rail yard was part of the fight against “urban blight.”

“[The Prudential Center] is the biggest thing that has ever happened in Boston in a physical sense. There has never been anything here faintly resembling it.”

-Mayor John Hynes, cheering the budding project on.  The Pru was big not only “in a physical sense” but also in the way it signaled the mid-century shift to a new Boston, characterized by an expanded downtown, a daily influx of commuters, and an emphasis on highways, parking lots, and plazas.

The rendering of the tower and the north plaza accompanied the July 1958 rendering of the Prudential Center. Here, the tower appears as a glassy prism. The plaza level was accessible by two sets of escalators as well as the ceremonial staircase (Courtesy of Prudential Financial, Inc.)

“Our concept required that we make a firm decision at the very start on the shape and height of every building in the project, because we had to build the foundations for all the structures at the same time that the plaza level and garages were being built.”

-Principal architect Charles Luckman in his later autobiography, recalling in the haze of memory the planning of the Center.  In fact, the plans for the location and heights of the buildings were changed many times over the course of the project’s development.

“Luckman sold soap better than he designed buildings.”

-Robert Campbell, architecture critic at the Boston Globe, commenting on Luckman, who had been a business chieftain and the president of Lever Brothers before he returned to architecture.   Campbell took to presenting annual “Pru Awards” for the ugliest Boston buildings of each year. Other critics shared his view of the Pru as “an ugly alien.”

“It is easy enough to refer irreverently to a major undertaking as a burden on the artistic sense of the public — but . . . why don’t we wait and look at the complete relationships before we offer negative opinion?”

-Mayor John Collins, defending the Pru from criticism as its opening drew near.

A photograph of the recently completed Prudential Center in 1968 focuses on the War Memorial Auditorium building, foreground, designed by Hoyle, Doran, and Berry (Courtesy of the City of Boston Archives)

“Secretaries, executives, clerks, salesmen stream from the tower through tree-lined plazas. Passing fashionable shops, gliding down smooth escalators, and filling subways and the new Massachusetts Turnpike extension – they head for home. The working day is over for the tower’s thousands.”

-June Bibb in The Christian Science Monitor at the time of Prudential Center’s opening, observing the commuter-oriented midtown mega-structure that the Pru exemplified.

Today, when some of us cast a jaundiced eye on the Pru – while commuting to work on the Pike, or strolling on the esplanade by the Charles River, or cheering from the stands at Fenway Park – we should remember that, at a time when American cities were struggling, the Prudential company took a gamble and made a decisive investment in its new home.  And perhaps the fact that we’re all still here, criticizing it some fifty years later is a sign that the gamble paid off.

Elihu Rubin is an architectural historian, city planner, and documentary filmmaker. He is the Daniel Rose (’51) Visiting Assistant Professor of Urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture. You can follow the “Insuring the City” blog for more updates and information about the book.

Hitler’s relationship with the city was above all instrumental, changing as he came into power to reflect the way in which the city could be used to forward to drive the Nazi agenda forward.  From fairly early on, it is clear he saw the potential in urban planning:  Hitler’s secretary Rudolf Heß recalled that, “he often walked with us through Berlin, which he knew like the back of his hand, and with a wave of his hand demolished old and unattractive blocks of houses so that existing buildings or others yet to be constructed should have more space to create a better impression.”

Later, at a meeting with municipal authorities in 1933, Hitler made the aims of such redevelopment schemes clear, announcing that, “Berlinmust be raised to such a height in respect of its urban planning and culture that it can compete with all the cities of the world.” Also in 1933, leading up to the opening of the Berlin Olympics, Hitler arranged for the Reich—rather than the city— to oversee the construction of new athletic facilities. His logic, expressed in a meeting at which the famous Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels was also present, was that if the world had been invited toBerlin, the Olympic site needed to show “exactly what the new Germanywas capable of achieving culturally.” The readiness with which Hitler devoted the Reich’s funds to the project is indicative of its importance to his political schemes: in 1934, he promised 1.2 billion marks to redevelopBerlinduring the following two decades.

While Hitler’s architectural rhetoric tended to focus on nationalism and the project of creating a “real and genuine capital of the German Reich,” his architectural ambitions also formed a part of his autocratic politic scheme.  Friedrich identifies among “the standards that he applied to buildings designed for the exercise of state power” the ability to impress visitors, along with the power “to inspire in them a sense of fear.” In this way, then, the new face of Berlin was inexorably tied to the Fuhrer’s anticipated domination of all Europe, meaning that, with the commencement of WWII and Hitler’s eventual suicide, the world capital Hitler wanted to name “Germania” would remain forever Berlin, truly a city “abused” by the political ambitions that attempted to shape it.