Ready to Soar

Manhattanites seldom waste a glance on the towers of steel and stone that hem them in. They are content instead to let their eyes rest on rich objects displayed behind plate glass in the towers' ground-floor shops. Last week a new office building on midtown Park Avenue forced New Yorkers to look aloft for the simple reason that it has no shops and seems, to have no ground floor at all.

Almost the entire street level of the new building, Lever House, is given over to a parklike complex of garden and patio, open to the air and open to the casual stroller, while the building itself, a starkly modern, $6,000,000, 24-story, glass-encased monument to the soap industry, rises delicately overhead on stainless steel columns. The net effect is one of jet-propelled urgency held thankfully and restfully at bay.

Beyond the Past. This subtle architectonic paradox was no doubt far from the minds of the directors of Lever Brothers Co. (Lux, Lifebuoy, Pepsodent) when they first approached an architect to design their new U.S. headquarters. The persuasive arguments that set the design and the revolutionary innovations of the building that resulted are both characteristic of the architects they chose. In the 16 years since it was founded in a one-room office in. Chicago, the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has made itself one of the biggest names in U.S. architecture. Its billion dollars-worth of buildings stretch across the U.S.. and as far afield as Sumatra. What is even more remarkable, all their work is built in the rigorously modern style still referred to as "crackpot" by unobserving standpatters. Among some of the firm's major jobs: the Ohio State University Medical Center, a vinegar plant and warehouse for H. J. Heinz Co., and the entire town of Oak Ridge, Tenn.

As in most big business today, the firm's triumphs are the result of group effort. Louis Skidmore, 55, and his cofounder, Nathaniel A. Owings, 49, were both trained in the Beaux Arts ("best things of the past") tradition, but quickly looked beyond it. With John Merrill, 55, and their seven partners, six associate partners, 13 participating associates and 700-odd dedicated young draftsmen, engineers and experts, they have taken the ideas of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and other pioneers of the International (or United Nations Building) School and moulded them to the needs of their clients.

More than a Quick Profit. When Lever House was in the early design stage, Skidmore experts spent days assembling an impressive array of arguments against ground-floor shops, e.g., shops would require basement storage space that might better serve as a Lever garage, in bad times the company might have to subsidize the shops to give the building a prosperous appearance, etc. By the time the soapmen got to see the final soaring design, they were dead set against shops. "They liked what they saw," says Skidmore, "and they wanted something more than a quick profit."

"A client," Architect Skidmore once said, "usually feels confidence and pride that a structure is being designed for his particular problem ... In this way modern expression of his problem seems natural, and contemporary architecture has sold itself."

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