MONUMENT IN BRONZE

CORPORATIONS are not expected to have souls, but the men who run them often strive to give them personality and prestige that go beyond the point of standard salesmanship. Out of the effort to achieve that prestige has come a special category of architecture: the showpiece office building. Among the newest and most impressive of U.S. corporation castles is Manhattan's 38-story headquarters for the whisky-making House of Seagram, now being finished at 375 Park Avenue, the first bronze-sheathed skyscraper ever constructed.

Built at an estimated cost of $35 million, the Seagram monument is set back on a twin-fountained, granite and marble plaza that serves as its pedestal. By day it is a soaring column the color of an old cannon; by night it is a giant, glowing shaft punctuating the Manhattan skyline (see color page). It is the definitive statement of what a skyscraper can be by the architect whom most purists hail as the master of glass-and-steel design: Chicago's German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 71 (TIME, June 14, 1954).

Search for the Man. Mies van der Rohe's chance to build his first Manhattan skyscraper came through a young woman who is neither a corporation executive nor a professional architect, but has a personal interest in both Seagram's and architecture. Mrs. Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, 31, daughter of Seagram President Samuel Bronfman, was living in Europe in 1954 when she saw a magazine story about the building her father proposed to build. "I was boiling with fury," she recalls. "I wrote him that he wanted a really fine building, and he was lucky to be living in a period when there were great architects."

Phyllis was promptly invited to come home and find a good architect. "I didn't think of anything else for 2 1/2 months," she says. She went to see a friend on the staff of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, was sent down the hall to Architect Philip Johnson, then the M.M.A.'s director of architecture. There the trail to Mies began.

Johnson drew up a list of the top dozen U.S. architects Phyllis might visit. Interviewing each in turn, she asked a basic question: "Given the problem of an office building in New York, who is going to make the greatest contribution?" When she discovered "everybody seemed to be talking in Mies's terms or denying him," her search was ended.

Her father invited Mies to come to Manhattan, signed him up for the building. There were some anxious hours when it developed that Chicago's Mies had no license to practice in New York, did not have the high-school education required for a license, and refused to take the prescribed examination. Red tape was cut to get the great architect a New York license. To help him through the intricacies of the city's building code, and to detail the interiors, Mies called in Philip Johnson as his collaborator.

Accent of Emptiness. Mies van der Rohe believes that "structure is spiritual"; his aim is to express the skyscraper's essential steel cage as dramatically as possible and with a maximum of economy. In the Seagram building, he did this with deceptive simplicity. To avoid the stairstep building plan that Manhattan architects have overused to meet zoning requirements (the tower must be only 25% of the site area), Mies sacrificed valuable Park Avenue frontage, threw open a wide plaza. This gave him an opportunity to create an accent of emptiness, at the same time gave his building a dramatic setting.

Flanking the central tower, Mies designed wings, thereby gained valuable rental area and created a backdrop that from the street effectively masks the old Y.W.C.A. building at the rear of Seagram's. To strengthen the structure against winds, he designed concrete sheer walls for two sides in the rear. Bronze sheathing for the exterior appealed to Mies because "it is a very noble material and lasts forever if it is used in the right way." Expected to weather to a darker shade, except where the wind scours the edges bright, the bronze will be hand-wiped from top to bottom with lemon oil whenever it gets blotchy.

"More of Less." Famed for his insistence on precision in both design and execution, Mies insisted that the 4-ft. 7 1/2-in. module for the building be rigorously carried throughout, allowed only a one-sixteenth-inch leeway even in the interior offices, hallways and shower rooms. Draftsmen on the job rapidly discovered that Mies's doctrine of "less is more" applies to work as well as design, spent weeks redesigning door handles, mail chutes and even fire alarms to put them in harmony with the building. To heighten the impact of Mies's austere geometry, the building and plaza were finished off in rich materials. Siding the plaza are thick strips of green marble; inside, the elevator lobbies have travertine walls and terrazzo floors. In the Seagram offices most walls are covered with vinyl plastic, the executive suites with panels of English oak, the couch in the executive washroom with white plastic. Cracked Architecture Critic Henry Russell Hitchcock: "I've never seen more of less."

When Seagram's moved into the first nine floors of its house last December (the rest of the building, now 90% rented, will be ready in May, the large ground-floor restaurant in August), Mies van der Rohe proudly announced: "This is my strongest work." Says Architect Scout Phyllis Lambert: "You feel its force and restfulness as you enter. From the framing of the windows to the total building, love has gone into it--love for every detail."

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