26 The New York Review
to the southeast. Hitchcock’s assess-
ment was soon borne out when Mies’s
infinitely superior bronze-framed
Seagram Building of 1954–1958 was
erected diagonally across Park Ave-
nue from Lever House. Although the
latter holds up as an arresting, enter-
taining design, it was never profound
architecture.
Far better, in my opinion, is SOM’s
Manufacturers Trust Company Bank
of 1953–1954, several blocks southwest
on Fifth Avenue. Part bare-bones Flo-
rentine palazzo and part superscale
Japanese lantern, it is a much less gim-
micky and more proportionally satis-
fying composition than Lever House.
Furthermore, it is truly transparent,
day and night, in a way that few glass-
walled buildings are, thanks to the
carefully considered dimensions of its
interior volumes and attentively mod-
ulated lighting levels. The uncommon
amount of forethought its designers
gave to how the building might be ul-
timately repurposed for functions
other than banking has enabled its ar-
chitectural integrity to survive intact
despite its current use as a clothing
store.
Perhaps the most determinative skill
Bunshaft developed at MIT was an un-
canny ability to scrutinize the designs
of his fellow students, analyze them
quickly, and then synthesize the best
aspects of their ideas into a better solu-
tion of his own. Adams cites an early
SOM colleague of Bunshaft’s who re-
membered years later talking to one of
his classmates at MIT:
He said, “Gordon was the kind of
guy that would walk around”—and
I can just see him—“and look at
everybody else’s scheme. He didn’t
necessarily steal your scheme, but
he stole the best of every scheme.”
When I say “stole,” I use his words.
“He stole the best of every scheme,
and then he’d put it together and
win the prize.” Gordon had this
wonderful knack for sifting out.In fact, this is common practice in
large architecture offices, where assis-
tants have often complained that they
are the actual authors of a scheme as-
cribed to the firm’s principal. Yet there
has never been a more concise de-
scription of Bunshaft’s creative modus
operandi than this, or of the way his
colleagues would acquiesce to his ap-
propriations because of his repeated
ability to improve upon their work, as
was further explained by that same
collaborator:
Gordon used us as hands really.
It was wonderful. It was just like
he was an octopus. He could do
all the thinking, and he had all of
us young guys do these beautiful
drawings for him or whatever he
needed done.Yet there was also bitterness among
some of Bunshaft’s colleagues about
his tendency to assume all the credit for
their joint work, which another partner
called “morally reprehensible.”
A more specific SOM personnel
issue that has been raised recently con-
cerns Natalie de Blois (1921–2013),
the highest- ranking woman in the firm
during the Bunshaft years and its first
female partner. That the immensely
talented de Blois was the victim of sex-
ual discrimination is beyond question:
she was omitted from pitch meetings
with potential patrons because of her
gender; Bunshaft told her not to at-
tend the opening of a building she’d
worked on because she was heavily
pregnant, and he once sent her home
to change because he did not like her
green dress. Those might not have
been the worst of the indignities she
suffered.
As Adams explains, every SOM job
involved the direct participation of
four senior employees, designated,
in descending order of authority, as
administrative partner (the maindecision- maker), project manager, se-
nior designer, and job captain. On a list
Bunshaft drew up, he named himself
as administrative partner on sixteen of
the thirty-eight commissions for which
he claimed principal credit and iden-
tifies de Blois as senior designer for
seven buildings (three of them under
him).
Adams also quotes SOM employees
who recall Bunshaft’s tendency to in-
sert himself into many projects he was
not officially involved with, as well as
his active participation in others for
which he declined credit. The firm kept
detailed time sheets for billing pur-
poses, and it awaits the patient foren-
sics of future historians to determine
who was responsible for what in each
instance.
The pendulum has now swung to a
point where de Blois has been widelyclaimed to be primarily responsible
for two SOM projects on Park Ave-
nue—the Union Carbide building and
the Pepsi Cola Headquarters, both of
1957–1960 —but Adams is careful to
include de Blois’s remarks about work-
ing with Bunshaft:When I worked for Gordon he
would either say “This is what I
want.” Or he would say “This is
what the project is.” And I would
go to work.... He’d sketch out what
he wanted. That was our guide and
then as the design developed, you
would show him drawings... so
he could see that they were devel-oping the way he wanted them to
or not.Adams makes no revisionist claims for
de Blois’s authorship despite others’
well-intentioned attempts to reassign
certain SOM schemes to her. “As a cor-
porate entity, Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill is not easy to understand,” he
has observed with much understate-
ment, and we must accept this diligent
expert’s word.3.
In 1943 Bunshaft married Nina Way-
ler, a Connecticut-born dancer of
Jewish descent who made her debut
at age fourteen with the Los Angeles
Opera. She appeared in Cole Porter’s
1939 Broadway musical DuBarry Wasa Lady, but forsook the stage when she
wed the up-and-coming architect, and
by the time I first met the couple in 1976
she seemed sadly beaten down. Her
chief creative activity had become
painting smiley faces on flat stones she
found at the beach near their week-
end home in East Hampton. That
travertine- veneered shoebox overlook-
ing Georgica Pond owed an obvious
debt to Philip Johnson’s Glass House of
1947–1949 in New Canaan, Connecti-
cut. But although the Bunshaft house
had a similarly idyllic wooded setting
and elegant low-slung proportions,
its hermetic quality, so telling of its
inward- turning designer, was antitheti-
cal to Johnson’s gleeful flair for provoc-
atively transparent exhibitionism.
I had been asked to write an arti-
cle about the Bunshafts’ classic In-
ternational Style apartment in SOM’s
Manhattan House of 1947–1951, a
white-brick-clad structure that occu-
pies an entire block on the Upper East
Side and is still ranked among the city’s
best midcentury modern multiunit
dwellings. Their stringently arranged
décor—white walls, paired Barcelona
chairs, and glass-topped coffee table
set just so, with an eclectic array of
artworks positioned as if this were a
live-in gallery—seemed consistent with
their uptight demeanor. The architect
was sour and unforthcoming, while his
wife sat virtually mute throughout our
stilted and uncomfortable encounter.
Nina Bunshaft’s extreme reticence
became understandable to me several
years later during a dinner party at the
art-filled Manhattan townhouse of a
billionaire MoMA trustee. At one point
the architect overheard something his
wife said on the other side of the table
and suddenly barked at her, “Shut up,
Nina! You don’t know what the hell
you’re talking about!” She smiled
tensely but said nothing, and after a
stunned silence among the rest of us,
general conversation resumed. When
I mentioned this ugly incident to the
hostess as I said goodnight, she noncha-
lantly replied, “Oh, that happens with
them all the time.” Adams goes out of
his way to stress Bunshaft’s repeated
avowals of love for Nina, but the archi-
tect had a strange way of showing it.
The most attractive aspect of Bun-
shaft’s personal life was his genuine
passion for art, which gave this non-
verbal, unintrospective, and intellec-
tually incurious man the semblance
of an inner life. He and his wife ac-
quired almost 350 pieces of modern,
African, and Asian art during their
nearly five-decade marriage, and they
bequeathed most of it to MoMA, on
whose board of trustees Bunshaft sat
from 1975 until his death in 1990. He
also established cordial friendships
with his two favorite living artists: Jean
Dubuffet, eighteen of whose works
the couple owned; and Henry Moore,
with twenty-nine examples. Bunshaft
in turn commissioned them to create
sculptures for several SOM projects.
A perusal of MoMA’s permanent
collection inventory suggests that a
number of the Bunshafts’ gifts have
since been deaccessioned and the pro-
ceeds applied to other purchases. In
truth, although the couple owned some
masterpieces—including Alberto Gia-
cometti’s marvelous bronze Walking
Quickly Under the Rain (1948), still at
MoMA—most of their holdings were
rather conventional. Another major
exception was Joan Miró’s hauntingEzra Stoller/EstoLever House, New York City, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1950 –1952