LEVER HOUSE / RESEARCH PRECIS
"They [gardens] are, rather, compositions in topological space."(1) --Isamu Noguchi
In 1950 and 1952, before and after construction, Lever House was lauded in the architectural press as a masterpiece of planning and design. The “Little Skyscraper” was praised as an elegant alternative to the growing bulk of generic Manhattan office towers. Acknowledging the influence of both Rockefeller Center and the United Nations -- and the implicit relationship of building to street and courtyards -- Lever House defied the then prevalent trend of maximizing building volume and floor area. This decision was partly driven by local criticism of the proposed building’s violation of Park Avenue’s street wall, but Lever Brothers, SOM and Gordon Bunshaft preferred anyway the production of intimate, livable interiors open to views of exterior atmospheric and landscape effects. Raymond Loewy Associates interiors and the upper level ‘patio’ perfectly complimented this “domestic” sensibility.
1950 – SOM plans for Lever House circa 1950, published in Architectural Forum (June 1950), reinforce this corporate domestic image with a garden court that incorporates an elongated Roman “impluvium”, situated within a raised marble planter. The recessed pool mimicked the classical impluvium but also included a sculptural form ‘floating’ above the planter. Isamu Noguchi, though not named in the text, is the presumed author of this garden element. A single tree -- a willow -- placed off center provided additional sculptural effects. Both the Noguchi sculpture and the willow were meant to be visible from Park Avenue, the latter rising above the surrounding architectural podium and emerging above the upper garden terrace. The ground floor lobby-gallery was purposely integrated with the courtyard as a glassed extension of the open ground plane incorporating ideas pioneered by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier in modernist villas. The garden and courtyard scheme avoided any mid-level shrub layer, as added in 1952, substituting the minimal sculptural and formal elements as middle ground. A groundcover planting ran continuously through the planter merging with the glass curtain wall and ending within the lobby, beyond the glass. Here, the sculpture gallery perfectly reflected the ‘open’ and uncluttered condition of the exterior courtyard. The clarity and elegance of the marble planter, mediating as it does between the street and the entrance to the building, was markedly diminished with the changes made prior to construction in 1951.Image (above) - Isamu Noguchi, "Song of the Bird" (c.1952)
1952 - The installed landscape plan, published in Architectural Forum in 1952, omits the impluvium and sculpture and substitutes a strip of shrubs running the length of the planter. The domestic metaphor was somewhat weakened and the landscape lost all figurative associations and human-scale referents. The domestic nature of the Lever House, on New York’s premier domestic avenue, was significantly diminished in the built plan by the elimination of the principal metaphoric and formal device at the street -- the pool and sculpture.
1999 - The existing planting of the courtyard is a further erosion of the initial conceptual strength of the landscape as integral to the architecture and incorporates ‘fake’ topography and a planting plan oblivious to the original precepts for the corporate ‘residence’. The existing hawthorn trees are not of the same scale or number as the original single willow and are not capable of rising above the architectural podium. They are however consistent with the median plantings on Park Avenue. The current mix of shrubs and perennials is totally out of character with the modernist schema of both the 1950 proposed and 1952 built plans and provides a generic sense of place versus an abstract, idealized tableau based on the domestic and civic model of the Roman atrium or peristyle.
GK (New York, 2000)
ENDNOTES
1 - Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 270
POSTSCRIPT - Regarding the relationship between Louis Kahn and Noguchi, Ashton writes: “Louis I. Kahn was perhaps the sole American architect whose way of thinking about his art was profoundly akin to Noguchi’s own. Kahn’s vision of the sanctity of nature, much like that of Noguchi’s beloved Blake, corresponded to Noguchi’s own feelings. Both artists were sensuously aware of nature’s continuum; both strove to reconcile vast stretches of history and man’s imagination with the demands and actuality of contemporary life.” (Ibid., p. 176) ... Noguchi worked with some of the toughest architects of the mid-century era: Tange, Kahn, Bunshaft, Breuer/Nervi … By the 1960s, the brutalist aesthetic was ascendent in the architectural avant garde … It sought an exemplary anti-aesthetic of primal tectonics … Friedberg merely copied Noguchi (and Noguchi knew it ...) ... Halprin is also of this secondary school … With Kahn (and perhaps hearkening back to Brancusi), Noguchi also found a ‘mystical’ component within which to situate a nominal anti-humanist pantheism … The formal jouissance of these maneuvers represent a similar spirit that motivated the conceptual artists of the 1960s … that is, the Land Artists and the Minimalists … Serra’s confrontational mode, Judd’s materialism (radical empiricism ???) each in its own way brackets the space in which Noguchi functioned … a more rarified space … All three seem to engender a critique of transcendental apperception insofar as they embrace, instead, a raw phenomenological gesturalism (a ‘lacerating’ gesturalism), as witnessed in Art Povera, all pointing in the direction of immanence (an archaic/modernist concentration of form wherein the age-old dialectic of form and content is merged/bridged ...) ... GK (04/14/04)
REMARKS DELIVERED AT YALE UNIVERSITY
"SAVING CORPORATE MODERNISM" SYMPOSIUM
"A Few Remarks about Architectural Justice"
Noguchi's Lever House project came at a time when the International Style was becoming the international corporate style -- as Italian baroque had become the international court style in the 17th century.Noguchi's approach to sculpture and landscape employed an archaic essence, a kind of writing zero degree indulged by modernist artists to avoid historicist quotation and imbue auratic depth. This is a Wittgensteinian language game, to privilege immanence or the thing itself. But as Giorgio Agamben has recently pointed out, the thing itself (a concept traceable to Plato) is language itself.
Noguchi's project was 'lost' due partly to the reactionary early 1950s, the McCarthy era. It is quite possible, though no evidence exists, that the squeaky clean Lever Brothers ditched the project when Noguchi was in the throes of petitioning influential friends, including Gordon Bunshaft, to intervene on his behalf with the Department of State to secure for his wife a U.S. visa. This problem, never resolved, had to do with purported activities by his wife, during W.W.II, on behalf of the Japanese government's propaganda machine. She was an actress and supposedly worked in films showing a benevolent Japanese presence in Manchuria. Noguchi wrote a particularly dejected letter late in this game announcing his intention to never return to the U.S. Throughout this mess, he was traveling abroad despite Bunshaft's frequent pleas for him to return and attend to the project at hand.
The project fell through for many reasons, all of which are, today, history. Yet the current plan to restore parts of the scheme and to install a two-year exhibition of Noguchi's work from this period is a retroactive gesture of goodwill and constitutes a small measure of 'architectural justice'.
In these post-cultural times, Noguchi's abstract yet symbolic language of forms still speaks to us and deserves our attention.
Gavin Keeney (February 5, 2001)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYAna Maria Torres, Isamu Noguchi: A Study of Space (New York: Monacelli, 2000)
Isamu Noguchi, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Abrams, 1987)
Dore Ashton, Noguchi: East and West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); See “We Are a Landscape of All We Know”, pp. 242-267
Robert Wilson, et alia, Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2001) -- A curious 'conceptual' re-presentation of Noguchi’s work - Cliquez ici .../FONT>
Image (above) - Herodiade (1944), "stage set elements" (for Martha Graham) in Robert Wilson’s installation "Isamu Noguchi: Sculptural Design at the Design Museum" (Vitra, 2001)