In April 1952, architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill unveiled its newest office building in New York City’s Midtown to spectators, business leaders, and fanfare from the press. ”It’s something strikingly new,” the New York Times wrote on the day of the opening. Built as the new headquarters for soap company Lever Brothers, it brought a facade of glass and steel to a Park Avenue dominated by brick and stone. Seventy years later, a redevelopment project is hoping to turn this icon of the past into a workplace for the future.
With its large outdoor space and air conditioned office floors, Lever House was lauded for bringing unprecedented access to light and air to the 1,200 employees of Lever Brothers. One 1952 press release billed it as “the answer to problems of modern city planning.” The building, featuring a curtain wall of blue-green glass and an open street-level plaza, was also Manhattan’s first example of the International style of architecture, which in the following decades would become the dominant style of corporate architecture in the US.
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