Lever House, the first all-glass International Style office building in New York City, passes its half-century mark this year. The 24-story green glass building, which has been partially hidden by scaffolding for the past three years, has undergone a $60 [#image: /photos/54cbfe4244a199085e895fc6]million refurbishment?including a top-to-bottom restoration of its curtain wall, which, being the first of its kind, was technologically primitive and thus had decayed badly over the decades, to the point where it was literally starting to disintegrate. As one of the most acclaimed buildings of the 20th century, Lever House has often been called the Platonic building of the 1950s, a sea-foam-tinted gem which brought to a new level of refinement the Le Corbusier?Mies van der Rohe style of lightweight glass-and-steel construction. Its meticulous restoration is a cause to celebrate.

In 1952, the last year of Harry S. Truman’s administration, when only three percent of the American public traveled by plane and only 34 percent had TV sets, Lever House looked as if it had dropped from the sky onto Park Avenue across from the Racquet and Tennis Club and the grand old Montana apartments. Its elegant glass-and-stainless-steel slabs?a horizontal one set over columns on an open ground floor, and a vertical one perched as if floating above it?were quite unlike anything New Yorkers had ever seen. By day the structure shimmered in the sunlight and reflected the brick and limestone buildings around it. By night it lit up like a taut rectangular lantern?a vision of the future on a block between 53rd and 54th Streets. For weeks after Lever House opened its doors in April, curious citizens lined up to enter its airy lobby for a closer look. The architecture critic Lewis Mumford noted that the public was acting as if the new soap-company headquarters were “the eighth wonder of the world.”

The Glass House, as the press called the building?so different from the sooty brick and limestone ziggurats of New York’s previous architectural generations?became an instant icon. Two decades of economic hardship and war had recently drawn to a close. In those years no significant buildings, with the exception of Rockefeller Center, had been constructed in New York. But now the economy was starting to roar, and the greatest building boom in the nation’s history was under way.

An all-American venture, Lever House was the work of a then obscure architectural firm called Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (now one of the world’s largest) and its chief designer, Gordon Bunshaft, who in the 50s and 60s was to become a key player?perhaps the key player?in the transformation of European modernist architecture from its beginnings as a radical style rooted in socialism to its ultimate destiny as the style of corporate America and the American Century.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (S.O.M.) was founded in 1936 by friends and in-laws Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings. Skidmore, known as “Skid,” was married to Owings’s sister, Eloise. John Merrill, an engineer, was brought into the partnership in 1939, but played a relatively minor role. The original office was in Chicago, but Skidmore soon moved to New York, where he was engaged as a consultant for the 1939 World’s Fair.

Working in a small studio at 5 East 57th Street, Skidmore and a few associates churned out designs for fair pavilions for companies such as Heinz, Wonder Bread, and Westinghouse. Such small-scale corporate commissions would later yield important business for the firm, most notably from Heinz, for which S.O.M. designed buildings in the United States and England.

Both Skidmore and Owings were smooth, charismatic clubmen who moved easily in the world of the Wasp business establishment. Owings, especially, was adept at prying commissions out of C.E.O.’s. What the partners were not known for was their talent as designers. From the very beginning, they depended on those they hired to do the creative work. However, they compensated with keen rainmaking skills, organizational talent, and a visionary flair.

In 1937, Skidmore made what would prove to be the best hire of his life. Gordon Bunshaft, a 28-year-old graduate of M.I.T., showed up at the 57th Street office with a stack of photographs he had taken in Europe on a prestigious award called the Rotch Travelling Scholarship. Skidmore (who had also won the Rotch) had a keen eye for talent and saw promise in the young man, whose only previous experience had been a few months with the fledgling practice of Edward Durell Stone and a short spell in the office of the industrial designer Raymond Loewy.

Almost immediately, Bunshaft established himself as the most talented designer in the Skidmore office. Soon he was given supervisory duties, the first of which was to oversee the Venezuelan Pavilion for the World’s Fair. The design Bunshaft produced (in two days) was an airy, glass rectangle, the walls of which were supported by thin columns of steel along the facade, and a slab canopy which tilted upward at a rakish angle and extended beyond the pavilion. Easily the best of the structures Skidmore’s office produced for the fair, it would be recognized as perhaps second only to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazilian Pavilion. The Venezuelan Pavilion pointed to Bunshaft’s skill with and commitment to the modern aesthetic. This would be the direction in which he would lead S.O.M. as its chief design partner, which Skidmore and Owings named him in 1949, a year after work began on the design of Lever House.

Born in Buffalo in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrants who had escaped the pogrom of 1905, Bunshaft is the stuff of legend in architectural circles. “He could be mean and gruff,” says Philip Johnson, an acquaintance for 40 years. “Until I got to know him, and then I became a tremendous admirer and a great friend. But that was towards the end. Before, when we were both working on Lincoln Center, we used to scream at each other. He was a good soul. But I never did know why he was so gruff.”

“He was a highly intelligent man. Probably exceptionally intelligent. But he was emotionally immature,” says Carol Herselle Krinsky, the author of Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1988). “I don’t know why that’s so,” she says. “I know something about his youth, but I have no idea what the dynamics were. I always thought it was a good thing that he and his wife, Nina, didn’t have any children, because he wasn’t emotionally mature enough to look after children.”

More than likely Bunshaft was crippled by insecurities about what he perceived to be his social and physical deficiencies. “He did have a certain social chip on his shoulder,” says Roger Radford, who was one of Bunshaft’s principal assistants for 28 years. “And, you know, he was tubby. He was a short, fat man, and I think he was conscious of this. However, he was always very well turned out?hair in a crew cut, immaculate tailored suits from Brooks Brothers.” Bunshaft never exactly hid his Jewishness (he was, most likely, an agnostic), but never dwelled on it, either, for many doors in the architectural world were still closed to Jews when he started out.

Bunshaft’s religion actually worked in his favor when S.O.M. was under consideration for the Lever House job. Charles Luckman, the president of Lever Brothers at the time, was Jewish. Bunshaft recalled that Skidmore and Owings invited him to a meeting with Luckman at the Lever Brothers’ apartment in the Waldorf Towers. “Skid and Nat took me along because they … thought … Luckman might think me compatible, or Luckman, being Jewish, might think I’m Jewish or something,” Bunshaft said. “I don’t know why they took me, but I didn’t say a damn thing in the meeting.”

Luckman was the right client at the right time for S.O.M. Trained as an architect, he went into the soap business during the Depression and rose to the top of Lever Brothers by the time he was 37. Having decided to move the company headquarters from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Manhattan, he wanted a building that would enhance the company’s prestige and increase its public profile.

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the program Luckman put forward for Lever House was that the building should not use the full amount of square footage allowed by New York City’s building codes. (In fact, it uses only half of the space allowed by law.) This was an extraordinary act of generosity on Lever’s part, resulting in a building of modest density with a great deal of open-air space around it. It also freed Bunshaft to design a structure with an unusual form?one that would allow light to pour onto Park Avenue and into the offices of the company’s 1,200 employees.

The form Bunshaft chose for Lever House was simple. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s Swiss Pavilion in Paris, he put the building on stilts, raising the horizontal slab?which is a block long and follows the Park Avenue building line?above an open ground-floor plaza. The tall, slender vertical slab, positioned at a right angle to Park Avenue, rises 22 stories and is set off center. This allows for a 50-foot-square courtyard in the middle of the “floating” piano nobile.

The ground floor of the building consists only of a garden set in the courtyard and the glass-enclosed lobby, underneath the tower, near the north end of the block. This “open plan” works well with Bunshaft’s scheme, but it was also very much a part of Luckman’s P.R. scheme for the building. He rightly determined that the publicity Lever would get by allowing pedestrians access to open gardens on Park Avenue would be far more valuable than the profits the company would make from renting ground-floor space to retail stores or a bank.

Luckman’s plan was soft-sell advertising brought to a new level of sophistication. As Mumford wrote in his review of the building in The New Yorker, “This whole structure is chastely free of advertisement; the minuscule glass cases showing life-size packages of Lever products in the glass-enclosed reception chamber on the ground floor would hardly be noticed in the lobby of a good hotel. But the building itself is a showcase and an advertisement; in its very avoidance of vulgar forms of publicity, it has become one of the most valuable pieces of advertising a big commercial enterprise could conceive.”

Another way Lever exploited the new building for publicity was by promoting the fact that the all-glass facade would be washed with Lever soaps. Since the building’s windows are sealed, they can be cleaned only from the outside. This, in 1952, was a problem, which was solved by the deployment of one of the first mechanical window-washing scaffolds, developed by a junior associate at S.O.M. working with the Otis elevator company.

Lever House’s window wall, which is made of green heat-absorbing glass (the only color available at that time), makes the building look voluminous, rather than massive. Aesthetically, it appears to be fragile and stable in equal measure. The sense of fragility comes from the “enveloping” of the building’s steel frame in glass; the outer columns are set back a little from the outer walls, allowing a smooth, uninterrupted machine-made surface to dominate visually. Stainless-steel window frames and spandrel frames on the curtain wall form an uninterrupted grid, with dark-green spandrels giving a horizontal emphasis.

When Lever House opened, the only other building in New York with a glass window wall was the United Nations Secretariat (completed in 1950 and designed by Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer, with an international consortium of architects). Lever House and the U.N. are related in principle, but there are major differences, the most dramatic of which is that Lever House is wrapped by glass on all sides (except for part of the west wall, which is a brick service core), whereas the U.N. is glass on only two sides. In addition, the windows at the U.N. are not sealed.

Ever since Mies van der Rohe had drawn proposals for monumental glass-walled skyscrapers in the 1920s, long before they were technically feasible, the dream of a glazed tower had been alive. Le Corbusier had experimented with glass curtain walls on a small scale, most famously?and disastrously?at the Salvation Army hostel (1933) in Paris, where the south-facing glass facade turned the un-air-conditioned dormitory into an avant-garde toaster oven. By mid-century, industrial-strength air-conditioning systems, as well as heat-absorbing glass and cooler fluorescent lighting, made the glass tower a possibility. It is interesting to note that Bunshaft, an indirect disciple of Le Corbusier and Mies, beat the two masters at their own game, pushing the limits of technology far enough to get the glass wall built before anyone else.

The year Lever House opened, it won the First Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (the first of 12 that Bunshaft-designed buildings would receive). Soon, however, as building after building on Park Avenue was torn down and replaced by a curtain-wall building?15 of them before 1958?the novelty started to wear off. “People began to miss the old Park Avenue. They were upset,” says Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and an expert on the architectural history of New York. “The reason office buildings came to Park Avenue was that the street, from 59th Street down, had been rezoned just before the war. So Manhattan lost in a short time the most exclusive portion of Park Avenue. Really very elegant. The most desirable residential buildings, with 15-room apartments, were torn down to make room for commercial real estate because the land had become too valuable.”

Sadly, most of the progeny of Lever House?including all of its neighbors on Park, with the exception of the Seagram Building and Bunshaft’s own Pepsi-Cola building?did not live up to the progenitor’s good design. In almost every other city in the world, there were soon irredeemably banal copies of Lever House, perpetrated by hacks working for developers who were pleased to exploit the glass box as a cheap, uncomplicated, and highly profitable solution for big commercial buildings.

In 1961, Vincent Scully Jr., the influential architectural historian at Yale, gave a paper at the New York Architectural League entitled “The Death of the Street,” in which he lamented the ruination of the old Park Avenue?which he called “one of the few convincingly imperial avenues in the world”?and placed much of the blame on Lever House for setting off the chain reaction of redevelopment. “Lever was an elegant, pristine object, and might have been considered a special adornment to the Avenue, the breaking of whose continuity might thus have been condoned,” Scully noted. “But when the building to the north of it was reclad in a glass and plastic skin imitating Lever’s, it became apparent that Lever itself had owed everything to the pre-existing civility of the street. No longer seen against the contrasting solid backdrop which the older buildings had made, Lever’s cool cube instantly lost something of its elegance and most of its point.”

The attack stuck, and opened the door for further critiques of Lever House as an “anti-urban” building. “It makes a lousy streetscape. Very bad,” says Stern. “It’s not inviting to sit underneath it, any time of day or year, really. You never see people lingering there. So the plaza, which was very much praised at first, and inspired New York to change its zoning regulations to encourage public spaces, turned out to be a failure. Also, the whole point of glass buildings, as Mies conceived it for his unrealized towers in Berlin, and as he developed it for the Seagram Building, and certainly as Bunshaft did for Lever House, was to be seen as a shimmery surface picking up the reflection of the sky and solid buildings. When the other solid buildings on Park Avenue went, that was a problem, because the one thing that doesn’t work well is when one glass building reflects another glass building. You get that fun-house effect.”

Scully’s critique of Lever House sparked a feud between the architect and the professor which lasted until Bunshaft’s death in 1990. Forty years later, Scully has not changed his tune. “Bunshaft sort of implied I was an idiot when I first talked about this idea of the death of the street,” he says. “He was very averse to the criticism that the building gouged a hole in the wall of the avenue. What he and other modernists were interested in was having their building stand out. They had this wonderful messianic view that all the other buildings were junk.”

Despite various criticisms over the years, Lever House has always been viewed by architects and historians as a watershed for architecture in the U.S. It was the first building ever to receive New York City landmark designation at the minimum age of 30, and Bunshaft became the only living architect with a New York City landmark building to his name. The same year, 1982, was also a nearly fatal one for Lever, as a developer bought the land underneath the building and attempted to tear it down and erect a bigger and more profitable office complex in its place. Ironically, one of Lever’s acknowledged virtues?the minimal use of its airspace?had made it a prime target for destruction. There was high drama in the civic-preservation world that year?and much press coverage?as a Save Lever movement was hastily formed, led in part by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Philip Johnson.

Three years ago, the ownership of Lever House changed again, when the German-born developer Aby Rosen and his company R.F.R. Holding bought the building for an undisclosed sum. (It had cost $6 million to build.) Lever Brothers has vacated all but the top four floors, and Rosen (who also owns the Seagram Building) has converted it into an office block. (There is also a restaurant planned for the ground floor, to be called Lever House.) New tenants include Alcoa and Prada, which pay between $80 and $100 a square foot, making it among the most expensive office spaces in New York City. When Rosen took over, he promised the Landmarks Preservation Commission that he would restore the building’s curtain wall, which had been decaying steadily due to structural defects. “No one knew exactly how bad the wall was,” says Rosen. “The deterioration … was beyond what we ever thought, and even the advisers whom we hired expected. When we opened it up, it was like some of the glass was just hanging on little strings of metal that was corroded away. So basically we had this plan to replace some of the glass and redo the steel frame where you would rehang the glass. We had to throw that plan into the garbage.”

Rosen hired David Childs and T. J. Gottesdiener, partners at S.O.M., to oversee the rebuilding and restoration. They worked closely with Gordon Smith, a curtain-wall expert, who drew up plans to rebuild the exterior. Rosen and the architects agreed not to attempt to salvage the existing stainless steel and glass.

“Our argument was that what was important about this [building] is that it was machine-made,” says Childs. “It has smoothness and a machine quality to it. And it was better in the preservation of it to throw away the dented pieces of the structure. To actually take a new piece of stainless steel?exactly the same technology and fabrication?and replace that piece. That would be a better way to do it than to save this battered piece?which could never be made to look machine-made again. The landmarks commission bought that.”

The building’s street-level garden has been re-done and now includes three 1950s-period sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, who had been commissioned by Bunshaft to design landscaping and sculptures for the plaza. The original Noguchi plan was never realized, however, because Lever Brothers opted not to work with the artist. Around this time it was discovered that Noguchi was in the process of petitioning the State Department for a visa for his wife, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, who had acted in Japanese propaganda films during World War II.

Bunshaft was a pioneer in the incorporation of sculpture into modern architecture and later collaborated with Noguchi on six projects, including the Chase Building (1961) and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale (1963). In addition, he worked with Jean Dubuffet, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder, and collected works by all of them, which he left, along with paintings by Picasso, Helen Frankenthaler, and many others, to the Museum of Modern Art at his death.

The final years of Gordon Bunshaft’s life were bitter ones. He retired from S.O.M. in 1983, just as the firm was beginning to shift from his style of modernism to what he referred to as “postmodern junk.”

In the fall of 1987, an anonymous telephone call to the office of the Pritzker Prize Jury in Midtown Manhattan was fielded by the writer and critic Brendan Gill, who was serving as the secretary of the jury for the prize, which is often referred to as the Nobel of architecture. Gill recalled that “a gruff voice” was on the other end of the wire?a voice he immediately identified as that of Bunshaft. Unaware that he had been recognized, Bunshaft asked how nominations for the prize were made. “I replied that anyone could make such a nomination,” Gill recalled, “adding that often friends and admirers of an architect would write in to propose him. Armed with this information, Bunshaft promptly had himself nominated. He was right to do so.”

In 1988 he was awarded the prize jointly with Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil.

More than a decade later, it seems as if Bunshaft left the scene too soon. Modernism has made a comeback at S.O.M., and, after 50 years, Lever House has been reborn. Bunshaft would no doubt be pleased to find that the building that made S.O.M.'s reputation (and his own) is still, after all these years, the firm's most renowned work.

Matt Tyrnauer is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.