New York City adopted its first comprehensive zoning code, requiring many tall buildings to step back as they rose. This "setback" approach shaped the prewar skyline and later became a design problem modern architects tried to solve with new tower-and-plaza forms.
Later in 1932, Hitchcock and Johnson published The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. The book helped define the style’s key ideas for American audiences and provided a reference point that clients, architects, and critics could cite for years.
The Museum of Modern Art staged Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in New York, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. By presenting modern buildings as a shared style—flat surfaces, little ornament, and simple geometric form—the show gave a public name and a clear story to a growing movement.
During World War II, many large construction projects in the United States were postponed or redirected, and materials were constrained. This pause mattered because the corporate “glass box” office tower boom largely took off after the war, when companies had money and cities expanded rapidly.
Lever Brothers commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to build a new headquarters in Manhattan. Starting in 1950, the project aimed for a clean, modern image using a glass curtain wall (an exterior skin that does not carry the building’s weight).
Lever House opened on Park Avenue with a slab tower above a low podium and an open public plaza. It became a highly visible example of the International Style used for corporate branding—suggesting efficiency, modernity, and global reach.
Joseph E. Seagram & Sons began planning a new headquarters in anticipation of its 100th anniversary in 1958. The company sought a building that would project status and quality, showing how major corporations were starting to treat architecture as a strategic public image tool.
By April 1955, the Seagram project was formally commissioned, and the design moved toward a rigorous modern tower with a high-quality curtain wall and a carefully designed public plaza. This set the stage for a building where materials and details—especially the bronze-toned exterior—would signal corporate seriousness rather than cheap mass production.
Construction progressed in the mid-1950s, with demolition and site work giving way to the tower’s steel frame and curtain wall. The project’s urban design choice—a tower set back behind a broad plaza—offered a new model for how modern office buildings could meet the street while still creating open space.
The Seagram Building officially opened in 1958 as an International Style office tower designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson. Its bronze-and-glass façade and the plaza in front made it a highly influential corporate statement—an example widely studied and copied in later office buildings.
In 1961, New York City approved a major zoning update that introduced incentives for providing publicly accessible plazas. This policy shift helped spread the tower-and-plaza formula associated with buildings like Seagram, making corporate modernism part of the city’s standard development playbook.
In 1982, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated Lever House a landmark after proposals threatened its replacement. The decision showed that, within a generation, International Style corporate buildings were being treated not just as real estate but as cultural heritage with lasting influence.
Corporate commissions — Lever House, Seagram Building and the corporate adoption of the International Style (1929–1960)