Does it feel like I am always yelling at you that this plaza from 1968, or that building from 1983, must be saved? It feels like that to me, because I am, because the architecture that makes New York great, giving it variety, texture, and some generosity amid the towers, is constantly under threat.
I was genuinely shocked to wake up yesterday and read that the Union Carbide Building (1960), designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and occupying prime real estate on Park Avenue just north of the Pan Am Building (1963), was going to be torn down to build an even bigger skyscraper.
Principally, I was surprised that the Union Carbide Building wasn’t a designated landmark. The bureaucracy and strategy required to get buildings landmarked in New York too often means that advocates are playing defense, and the building under immediate attack gets the attention.
Union Carbide, however, is a superlative example of what Ada Louise Huxtable named “The Park Avenue School of Architecture” in 1957: sleek, shiny buildings that to her seemed like the city shaking off masonry, somnolence, the past, and marching up Park into the future. “In a surprise shift,” she wrote, “elegance has moved from domestic to professional life, from the apartment house to the office building.”
Union Carbide is certainly elegant: a squarish, black-and-silver slab, with a bustle at the back, that reaches up 52 stories without a break. You can’t get to the Union Carbide Building without its neighbor to the north, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. But you can say that about pretty much every glass-and-steel skyscraper built between 1960 and 1970. The dark exterior, the straight-sided tower, the plaza-as-apron all owe something to Mies’s example. But that doesn’t make Union Carbide a knock-off. Each modernist skyscraper learned from the one that came before, and made improvements.
The black metal exterior, ridged with thin silver ribs, was coated in one of Union Carbide’s latest products and thus, like Lever House’s window-washing apparatus, became a showcase for the company’s chemistry.
Union Carbide’s 5-by-5-foot interior grid was derived from the gauge of the Metro-North railroad tracks beneath Park Avenue. These tracks delivered the company’s suburban employees to its twin stainless-steel escalators every morning, and forced the company, like all of the other landowners on Park, to elevate its lobby to the second floor. The tower’s columns were spaced 20 feet on center, to fall between the 20-foot spacing of the existing track support columns running north-south underground.
De Blois created beauty out of necessity in the dramatic two-level lobby, originally accessible to the public, which served as a showcase for exhibitions of science and art. The necessarily giant elevator core was clad in red, like a piece of modern sculpture. The escalators on either side led visitors up to the mezzanine, acting as a technological version of Beaux-Arts museum steps.
On the office floors, the architects created an integrated, modular lighting and air-distribution system, intended to flex with any changes in the arrangements of partitions and work stations. The architects persuaded the client to accept modern furniture for all of the offices (even those of the executives) and customized desks, chairs, mail chutes and ashtrays with metals and plastics developed by the company. These office products, as well as others developed for Chase Manhattan, were eventually sold to other companies across the country. It was a total corporate work of art.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission response to Curbed says, in essence, “Sorry, Union Carbide, you’re just off the podium” occupied by the other superlative Skidmore, Owings & Merrill buildings of that era: Lever House, Manufacturers Trust, and Chase Manhattan Plaza. SOM’s Pepsi-Cola Building (1960), a petite masterpiece at 500 Park Avenue, was landmarked in 1995. But should SOM, with designers like Bunshaft and de Blois, be penalized for being too good, for working too much? Their buildings define postwar New York style, a style that, when repackaged in television shows like Mad Men, seems plenty modern enough for these times.
Union Carbide is not alone in being threatened by the East Midtown upzoning. The city’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the upzoning listed 56 structures eligible for New York City landmark designation or State or National Historic Register status. Twelve buildings in the zone, including 601 Lexington Avenue (aka the Late Modern Citicorp Tower) were landmarked en masse in late 2016.
At that time, the Historic Districts Council pointed out a number of additional postwar buildings and landscapes not on the list, including Paley Park at 3 East 53rd Street (Zion & Breen Associates, 1967) the former Girl Scouts of America Headquarters at 830 Third Avenue (SOM, 1957), the Universal Pictures Building at 445 Park Avenue (Kahn & Jacobs, 1946-47), and the aforementioned Pan Am Building.
Citizens of New York are well aware that Mayor Bill de Blasio is actively disinterested in design. Nonetheless, there is something unseemly, particularly for a mayor who acts as if he has environmentalist bona fides, about crowing over what would be the largest voluntary building demolition in the world. Renovation is always a better use of resources than demolition and replacement. No architect was mentioned in the New York Times story on the replacement. Are they hiding? There isn’t a skyscraper architect today who isn’t indebted to SOM, and buildings like Union Carbide, for advancing the form, the materials, and the systems that make the contemporary workplace. It’s the worst form of shortsighted to throw this building away.
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