Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

Philip Johnson (FIG. 36-64). By this time, the concrete-steel-and-
glass towers pioneered by Louis Sullivan (FIGS. 31-40and 31-41)
and carried further by Mies van der Rohe (FIG. 35-74) had become a
familiar sight in cities all over the world. Appealing in its structural
logic and clarity, the style, easily imitated, quickly became the norm
for postwar commercial high-rise buildings. The architects of the
Seagram Building (FIG. 36-60) deliberately designed it as a thin shaft,
leaving the front quarter of its midtown site as an open pedestrian
plaza. The tower appears to rise from the pavement on stilts. Glass
walls even surround the recessed lobby. The building’s recessed
structural elements make it appear to have a glass skin, interrupted
only by the thin strips of bronze anchoring the windows. The bronze
metal and the amber glass windows give the tower a richness found
in few of its neighbors. Mies van der Rohe and Johnson carefully
planned every detail of the Seagram Building, inside and out, to cre-
ate an elegant whole. They even designed the interior and exterior
lighting to make the edifice an impressive sight both day and night.

SKIDMORE, OWINGS, AND MERRILL The architectural
firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill(SOM), perhaps the purest
proponent of Miesian-inspired structures, designed a number of
these simple rectilinear glass-sheathed buildings, and SOM’s success
indicates the popularity of this building type. By 1970 the company
employed more than a thousand architects and had offices in New
York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Washington, D.C. In
1974 the firm completed the Sears Tower (FIG. 36-61), a mammoth
corporate building in Chicago. Consisting of nine clustered shafts

soaring vertically, this 110-floor building houses more than 12,000

workers. Original plans called for 104 stories, but the architects ac-

quiesced to Sears’s insistence on making the building the tallest (mea-

sured to the structural top) in the world at the time. The tower’s size,

coupled with the black aluminum that sheathes it and the smoked

glass, establish a dominant presence in a city of many corporate sky-

scrapers—exactly the image Sears executives wanted to project.

MAYA YING LIN Often classified as a work of Minimalist sculp-

ture rather than architecture is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (FIG.

36-62) in Washington, D.C., designed in 1981 by Maya Ying Lin

(b. 1960) when she was only 21. The austere, simple memorial, a V-

shaped wall constructed of polished black granite panels, begins at

ground level at each end and gradually ascends to a height of 10 feet

at the center of the V. Each wing is 246 feet long. Lin set the wall into

the landscape, enhancing visitors’ awareness of descent as they walk

along the wall toward the center. The names of the Vietnam War’s

1006 Chapter 36 EUROPE AND AMERICA AFTER 1945

36-61Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,Sears Tower, Chicago, 1974.

Consisting of nine black aluminum and smoked glass shafts soaring to

110 stories, the Sears Tower dominates Chicago’s skyline. It was the

tallest building in the world at the time of its erection.

36-60Ludwig Mies van der Roheand Philip Johnson,Seagram

Building, New York, 1956–1958.

Massive, sleek, and geometrically rigid, this modernist skyscraper has a

bronze and glass skin that masks its concrete and steel frame. The giant

corporate tower appears to rise from the pavement on stilts.

36-62A

WHITEREAD,

Holocaust

Memorial,

Vienna, 2000.