Lever House
Lever House is a office building at 390 Park Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, United States. Constructed from 1950 to 1952, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the International Style, a 20th-century modern architectural style. It was originally the headquarters of soap company Lever Brothers, a subsidiary of Unilever. Lever House was the second high-rise in New York City with a glass curtain wall, after the United Nations Secretariat Building.
The building has 21 office stories topped by a triple-height mechanical section. At the ground story is a courtyard and public space, with the second story overhanging the plaza on a set of columns. The remaining stories are designed as a slab occupying the northern one-quarter of the site. The slab design was chosen because it conformed with the city's 1916 Zoning Resolution while avoiding the use of setbacks. There is about of interior space in Lever House, making it much smaller than comparable office buildings in Midtown Manhattan.
The construction of Lever House changed Park Avenue in Midtown from an avenue with masonry apartment buildings to one with International-style office buildings. Several other structures worldwide copied the building's design. Lever House was intended solely for Lever Brothers' use, and its small size had prompted proposals to redevelop the site with a larger skyscraper. The building was nearly demolished in the 1980s, when Fisher Brothers proposed a 40-story tower on the site; afterward, it was narrowly approved as a New York City designated landmark in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places the next year. In 1997, Unilever relocated most of its offices out of Lever House, and Aby Rosen's RFR Realty took over the building. After SOM renovated the building between 2000 and 2001, Lever House was used as a standard office building with multiple tenants. Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark obtained a majority ownership stake in the building in 2020 and hired SOM to conduct another renovation in the early 2020s.
Site
Lever House is at 390 Park Avenue, on the western sidewalk between 53rd Street and 54th Street, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The land lot has a frontage of on Park Avenue, on 54th Street, and on 53rd Street, giving the lot a slight L shape. The lot has an area of. The Banco Santander building on 53rd Street abuts Lever House to the west, and the DuMont Building and Hotel Elysée on 54th Street occupy the same city block. Other nearby buildings include 399 Park Avenue directly across Park Avenue to the east; the Seagram Building diagonally across Park Avenue and 53rd Street to the southeast; and the CBS Studio Building, Park Avenue Plaza, and Racquet and Tennis Club Building across 53rd Street to the south. An entrance to the New York City Subway's Fifth Avenue/53rd Street station, served by the, is less than a block west along 53rd Street.The site, which was part of Charles McEvers's farm in the early 19th century, had been developed by the 1870s with four- and five-story row houses. By the late 19th century, the Park Avenue railroad line ran in an open cut in the middle of Park Avenue. The line was covered with the construction of Grand Central Terminal in the early 20th century, spurring development in the surrounding area, which was known as Terminal City. The adjacent stretch of Park Avenue became a wealthy neighborhood with upscale apartments. Twenty-two rowhouses on 53rd and 54th Streets, owned by Robert Walton Goelet, formerly stood on Lever House's site. Twenty of these were demolished in 1936 and replaced by the Art Deco Normandie Theater, as well as a one-story "taxpayer" building that was intended to preserve the site for future development. The two rowhouses at 62 and 64 East 54th Street remained standing.
Architecture
Lever House was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the International Style, a 20th-century modern architectural style. Lever House, the Seagram Building, the former Union Carbide Building, and the Pepsi-Cola Building are considered part of a grouping of International Style structures developed on Park Avenue from 46th to 59th Street during the mid-20th century. The building was constructed by main contractor George A. Fuller Company, with Jaros, Baum & Bolles as mechanical engineers and Weiskopf & Pickworth as structural engineers. Raymond Loewy Associates designed the interiors, since SOM had no interior design team when the building was completed in 1952.Lever House was built and named for the Lever Brothers Company, a soap company that was an American subsidiary of Unilever. Lever House is tall and has 21 usable office stories topped by a triple-height mechanical space. The design largely incorporates ideas first proposed by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the 1920s. The building's glass-and-metal facade was similar to Mies's designs, while its raised-on-stilts courtyard was influenced by Le Corbusier's teachings.
Form
The ground level of Lever House consists predominantly of an outdoor plaza, paved in light- and dark-colored terrazzo, with some indoor sections. A rectangular planted garden with a pool is at the center of the plaza. Lever House's plaza is legally a privately owned public space. To prevent adverse possession, wherein the city government takes over ownership of the plaza, the building's owners have closed the plaza to the public for one day every year since its completion. Within the ground-story plaza are rectangular columns clad in stainless steel, which support the second story. The columns, which extend to the underlying rock, are set behind the lot boundary to avoid interfering with the walls of the Park Avenue railroad tunnel. The column layout gives the appearance that the upper stories are floating above ground and resembles an architectural arcade. The second story has an opening at its center, overlooking the planted garden; the opening creates the impression of a courtyard.The third through twenty-first stories consist of a rectangular slab atop the northern portion of the site, occupying a quarter of the total lot area. The slab is only wide along Park Avenue, allowing all offices to be within of a window and thereby providing large amounts of natural light to tenants. Along 54th Street, the slab is wide and is set back from the street. The slab's positioning, with the shorter side along Park Avenue, allowed more natural light from the north and south facades and permitted natural light to illuminate the buildings to the south. This design also served a technical purpose, as it complied with the 1916 Zoning Resolution, intended to prevent new skyscrapers in New York City from overwhelming the streets with their sheer bulk. As a result of the slab's small size, Lever House has a floor area ratio of 6:1, compared to a FAR of 12:1 at Rockefeller Center and a FAR of 25:1 at the Empire State Building.
The building's form was influenced by the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required buildings to feature setbacks at progressively higher levels if the floor plates covered more than 25% of the land lot. Conversely, buildings could rise without setbacks if their floor plates covered at most 25% of their site. This theoretically allowed the construction of slab-like high-rises of unlimited height; in practice, Lever House was the city's first high-rise building to take advantage of this provision. Previous skyscrapers developed under this zoning code had been developed with setbacks as they rose. If all stories had contained the same area as the land lot, Lever House would have been equivalent to an eight-story structure. While Rockefeller Center's buildings had somewhat similar slab-like designs, the vast majority of the city's previous skyscrapers had been designed to fill the maximum volume allowed under the 1916 Zoning Resolution. Because Lever House is shorter than many other New York City skyscrapers, historian Carol Herselle Krinsky wrote that the building "barely qualifies as a skyscraper".
Facade
About 30% of the ground story is enclosed by glass and marble walls. Three revolving doors lead to a ground-level lobby near the northern half of the lot. The elevators and an auditorium and display area on the same floor are within a black marble enclosure at the northwestern corner of the building. At the lot's northwestern corner, a vehicular ramp from the western section of the 54th Street frontage leads to the basement garage and a loading dock. A white marble enclosure with stainless steel doors encloses an emergency exit stair at the southeastern corner of the ground floor.Above the ground floor, all elevations of the facade contain a curtain wall with heat-absorbing glass panes and stainless steel. The curtain wall, the second to be installed in New York City after that of the United Nations Secretariat Building, was fabricated and installed by General Bronze, which had just completed the Secretariat Building's curtain wall. Unlike at the Secretariat, where the narrower elevations were faced in solid material, all elevations of Lever House are faced in glass. The curtain wall spans most of the facade but is interrupted at the building's northwestern corner, where there is a service core with masonry cladding.
Curtain wall
The curtain wall contains vertical steel mullions, which are connected to the building's floor plates. Each pair of mullions is separated by glass window panes, which cannot be opened. These consist of greenish panes for windows on each floor, as well as opaque bluish panels for spandrels between floors. The spandrel panels are glazed, and black cinderblock walls behind the spandrels give them a dark hue. They are separated from the window panes by horizontal mullions and muntin grilles. When installed, the spandrel panels were intended to conceal the masonry construction of the superstructure. The window panes are tall, with the sill being above the top of each floor plate, thereby concealing air-conditioning units beneath each window. The mullions are nearly flush with the glass, projecting about from the outer surface of the glass panels. During nighttime, one of every five mullions is lit. Venetian blinds were used to reduce glare. During a renovation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the curtain wall was moved forward by.The curtain wall was intended to reduce the cost of operating and maintaining the property and, as designed, was intended to filter out thirty percent of heat from sunlight. The fixed-pane windows were cheaper to install and reduced the amount of particulate matter that entered the building, and they kept air conditioning costs down. Additionally, Unilever commissioned a window-washing scaffold, suspended from a "power plant car" on the roof. The first such device in the city, it could move vertically along steel rails embedded in the mullions. Kenneth M. Young of SOM designed the scaffold, having searched in vain for existing machinery that he could adapt for the building. Lever Brothers wanted the building to be "a symbol of everlasting cleanliness", and, according to Curbed, the scaffold was used for a publicity stunt that "used Lever-brand Surf soap to scrub the windows clean". Two window washers were hired to clean the facade every six days. Each of the building's 1,404 windows could be cleaned within ninety seconds; because the window panes were fixed, they could be cleaned in less than one-third of the time it took to wash a sash window.
The fixed-position window panes required that the building be air-conditioned, so steel grilles are also installed on the facade for ventilation intake. The curtain wall cost $28,000 more compared to normal sash windows, while the double glazing cost $135,000 and the window-washing equipment cost $50,000. However, the air conditioning system saved $90,000 in upfront costs, and it also saved $3,600 per year on energy costs and $1,000 per year on costs caused by hot and cold air escaping. The fixed window panes also saved $2,000 a year on window-washing costs compared to sash windows.