Pic of the Day: Lever House
As mentioned earlier, I spent most of last week at the printers. Literally. Anyway, every day I would walk from 53rd and Lex to 53rd and Madison, which takes you through a great collection of modernist skyscrapers (the Seagram Building, the Citigroup Center, the Lipstick Building, the Chippendale Building, and so many others). On the corner of 53rd and Park is the Lever House, which is notable particularly because it was one of the first buildings to use a large plaza to avoid set-backs imposed by zoning requirements (in the case of the Lever House, it is an elevated plaza).
So as I was walking by, I liked the view, especially with the reflections from the surrounding buildings.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Great picture. What are you shooting with?
How is the plaza elevated? It’s on the roof of ground-floor commercial space that is flush against the sidewalk? Sneaky sneaky, developers. Is there a mandate that the plaza be public space?
Apparently a favorite of developers to abuse the “make public open space, get greater floor space allowances” regulations was to create winding public open spaces a foot wide the entire length of the building, so they could net the equivalent of a 200 sq.ft. concession that was totally unusable.
March 7th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Thanks, I’m shooting on a Minolta DiMage G600. Small enough that I can carry it in my murse at all times. Then, when i’m actually thinking, I can pull it out and take snapshots of interesting things I see.
The plaza of Lever House is interesting. They’re on a corner lot. The office tower (which is what you see on the right in the picture) takes up maybe one-third of the space. The “ground floor” level for the other two-thirds is open, with an elevated 2nd story above it. However, this space has a cut-out in the middle, which gives light to a ground-level sculpture garden. So the ground-level plaza including the sculpture garden is (in theory) open to the public. I say in theory because the fact that it’s under an elevated building sends the pretty strong message that it’s not public space. I don’t think the elevated plaza is public, but I could be wrong.
Wikipedia, of course, has all the info you could ever want on the building.
Of course, I totally concur on the “sneaky, sneaky developers” point.