Seagram Building
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe + Philip Johnson · New York, United States · 1958
The Seagram Building distilled the International Style office tower into an exceptionally disciplined composition of bronze-toned curtain wall, exposed vertical proportions and a deliberately empty urban plaza. Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson set the tower back from Park Avenue, sacrificing rentable floor area to create a new type of privately owned public foreground for a skyscraper. Completed in 1958, the building became enormously influential in corporate architecture and in subsequent zoning approaches to plazas and setbacks.