Lever House
Gordon Bunshaft / Skidmore, Owings & Merrill · New York, United States · 1952
Lever House was among New York’s earliest major glass curtain-wall office towers and became a prototype for post-war corporate modernism. Gordon Bunshaft separated the program into a low horizontal podium and a slender slab raised above an open ground plane, producing a courtyard and public passage along Park Avenue. Its stainless-steel and glass skin rejected the masonry weight of earlier skyscrapers. Completed in 1952, the building strongly influenced the subsequent transformation of Midtown’s office architecture.