Saving the Unfashionable Past

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Builders try to overturn the landmark status of Lever House

On first thought, the idea of preserving New York City's 31-year-old Lever House as a historic landmark seems absurd. To some observers, the 24-story, blue-green glass slab seems shabby and unimpressive in the ice canyon of Park Avenue's taller and newer glass slabs. Yet last November the city's unsentimental landmarks preservation commission said that Lever House was worth saving. It pronounced the building in effect as important a memento of America's history as, say, the gilded facade of Grand Central Terminal, about ten blocks down the avenue. Now Fisher Bros., the real estate developers, have challenged this designation. They want to replace Lever House with a somewhat garish and more profitable 40-story tower that they say would earn the city an additional $9.4 million in taxes annually. Within the next five weeks, the city's powerful board of estimate will make the final decision on Lever House's landmark status.

In the past, American cities have too often resolved similar dilemmas by yielding to profit and "progress." The gain in revenue is canceled out by a loss of urban vitality. Some of the diversity, historic continuity and character of a city is destroyed when old buildings are razed. Character attracts visitors, gives residents a sense of belonging and accounts for the affinity between cities and civilization. The notion that we must revitalize the heart of a city every two decades, in accord with the latest architectural fashion, explains the cities' bland uniformity.

Despite its relative youth and somewhat dilapidated appearance, Lever House is as worthy a landmark as Grand Central Terminal. If Lever House, which is smaller than zoning codes permit, is an inefficient moneymaker and a somewhat obsolete office building, Grand Central is almost antediluvian. Nonetheless, New York's historic preservationists won an important battle five years ago when the Supreme Court defeated a preposterous proposal to build a new skyscraping tower on the old structure.

Recently spruced up, but, alas, so far only externally, Grand Central Terminal is a splendid specimen of Beaux-Arts architecture. It is also the statement of an era, a monument to the triumph of the railroads in forging an empire out of a wilderness and creating a wealth of museum treasures, public libraries and handsome buildings.

Much as Grand Central was early in the century, Lever House was at mid-century the proud proclamation of a new era. The spirit of this epoch was, in a way, as bold and arrogant as that of the railroad magnates. It was the period of great national and, ultimately, international corporations.

Charles Luckman, Lever Bros.' president from 1946 to 1950, and an architect, felt strongly that the era needed an architectural expression. He commissioned Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to find it for Lever's new headquarters on Park Avenue between East 53rd and East 54th streets. The inspiration for Bunshaft, who later built the glass-walled PepsiCo, Inc., building in New York City and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., was the International Style. It was the architecture of functionalism that had originated in Europe before World War II and had been introduced in New York by the international team of architects that designed the United Nations Headquarters building in 1947. But at that time the style had not really succeeded in Europe. Bunshaft's Lever House, completed in 1952, spread it with wildfire speed all over the world.

Bunshaft's Lever House consisted of two glass slabs. A one-story horizontal slab, partly on stilts, is laid parallel to Park Avenue. A 24-story vertical slab intersects the horizontal one and faces East 54th Street. The openings under the stilts lead to an interior court. The building occupies only 25% of the permissible space, for dramatic effect and to let light into the offices.

In retrospect, Bunshaft's abstract sculpture reflects the anti-urban bias of the early modern movement. Its vertical slab interrupts the building line along East 54th Street. Such disruption is now considered detrimental to an orderly street pattern. And the court Bunshaft created is uninviting and mostly empty.

But these insights came later. In 1952 Lever House was universally praised. On Park Avenue at present, its quality is surpassed only by Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, one block away. Said Architect Eero Saarinen: "Bunshaft should be covered with laurels. He has created one of the finest buildings of our time."

Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, the firm that has designed the proposed replacement for Lever House, has charged that Lever is out of date and badly deteriorated, requiring restoration that would cost millions of dollars. Retorts William Conklin, vice chairman of the landmarks commission: "It's absolutely ridiculous to say that the building is falling down. It is unfair exaggeration used for political impact."

It is true, however, that International Style architecture is not as popular today as it was 30 years ago. But the historic significance of architectural styles is as indisputable as the historic events surrounding them. Architecture, as Mies put it, "is the translation of the spirit of an epoch into space."

The most important argument for preserving Lever House is respect for the past. We do not throw out the wedding pictures of our parents because their dress now looks funny, or because the pictures are not quite so wonderful as we once thought they were.

--By Wolf Von Eckhardt. Rerported by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York

With reporting by Kathryn Jackson Fallon This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.