When shall your golden eyelashes waltz down
round your excellent shoulders on the half past six?
I want to fell your ankles and the water a-keen,
the glancing bubbles of those breaths.
Then passing; so articulate clearly:
"There's the cast-off grillwork of your smile,
which in a better world held down your heart."
Frank O'Hara
Ducal Days
[fragment]
1952
Locus Solus, 1961
Donald Allen, editor
The Complete Poems of
Frank O'Hara
op. cit.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Philip Johnson
The Seagram Building
375 Park Avenue
1958
Seagrams vs Lever, I took them both for granted when I lived there. So much is that way, it's just a requirement to s l o w d o w n.
ReplyDeleteGiven their juxtaposition a comparison is inevitable but I think it favours them both. Lever's alternative plaza, sheltered and then opened above by a generous setback, and then the elegant relationship with the tower, are other ways of giving back to that section of Park Avenue, among other virtues of SOM's influential and repeatable design. The great thing, however, across the street - inspiring as it may be - is daunting and inimitable. Hitchcock's title sequence for "North by Northwest," designed by Sam Bass, is very probably the most memorable animated tribute to a building on film, and of course the building is Lever House. I'm afraid I can't think of one without the other .. but possibly, if I were to slow down ..
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing up this gorgeous building.