LEVER HOUSE

A seminal work of Modernist architecture, Lever House redefined not only Park Avenue and corporate architecture, but also much of urban planning.

This "small" building, by midtown Manhattan standards, not only forswore utilizing its maximum buildable size, but it also sacrificed its extremely valuable ground-floor space for public purposes. While its catty-corner neighbor, the Seagram Building, was widely credited a few years later with spurring the movement for plazas, Lever House actually was the real pioneer.
Its design appears to be a paradigm of clean lines and simplicity, but in reality it is quite sophisticated.
A tower slab placed near the north end of the site "floats" above a "floating" platform raised on stilts, or pilotis.
A large rectangular well is cut into the platform to create an open courtyard. An employee terrace overlooks the lushly landscaped courtyard whose large planting area is surrounded by a continuous seating wall.
Stainless-steel columns support the platform and tower and all of the lobby, which is only under the tower portion of the site, except the elevator-bank section, is glass enclosed. The remainder of the ground-floor space is open and serves as an arcade, probably the city's widest on both the avenue and the 53rd Street portion of the site. The open street-level areas, shown below, beneath the floating platform are rather dark and unexciting and could use some color, lighting and perhaps a lot of ivy.