Vouch
The Architect · Lina · New York

Seagram Building

Midtown · Modernist skyscraper · Free

This is the one I send every architect to. Mies set the tower back 90 feet behind a granite plaza and gave the space back to the street — a move so radical the city rewrote its zoning to encourage it. The bronze I-beams are decoration pretending to be structure; understand that and you understand modernism's central lie.

Mies van der Rohe's 1958 bronze tower — the building every glass box since is quietly copying.

— Lina, The Architect
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