Lever House

The Lever House is an International Style skyscraper designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois as lead architect, and built between 1950 and 1952, for a reported $0.04 thousand dollars, in New York, NY.

Its precise street address is 390 Park Ave, New York, NY. You can also find it on the map here.

The Lever House is a structure of significant importance both for the city of New York and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the International Style style. Because of that, the Lever House was officially declared as a national landmark on November 9^th 1982, and was included in the National Register of Historic Places on October 2^nd 1983.

The Lever House has received multiple architecture awards for its architectural design since 1952. The following is a list of such prizes and awards:

• Best Building Award, Fifth Avenue Association in 1954
• National Plant America Award, American Association of Nurserymen in 1958
• National 25 Year Award, American Institute of Architects 
(AIA) in 1980
• AIA 25-Year Award in 1980
• Architecture League of New York Medal

At a time were all buildings in NYC were built with masonry facades and sash windows, the Lever House, with its shiny and reflective curtain wall, changed the paradigm of what an office building should look like.

The Lever House might not be as well known to non-architects as the Seagram Building, by Mies van der Rohe, just across the street, an it is true that SOM based their design on many of Mies’s ideas, but one way or another the Lever House was the first to implement them in Manhattan.

1952, The Lever House was the second building in the city to install a curtain wall, only second to the UN building on the East side of the city.

In the 1980’s the owners of the building wanted to demolish it to build a higher one with more rentable space, but thanks to the pressure of some very important people, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the building was saved and granted landmark status, which protects it against future demolition threats. .

At the time of its completion in 1952 the Lever House incorporated solutions that were quite advanced at the time, these included the first window-washing scaffold in the city, also designed by SOM. The Lever Brothers’ wanted the building to be “a symbol of everlasting cleanliness”, since, after all, they were a soap company.

The building has been restored 2 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 2001 and 2023.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois as the lead architect, was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the Lever House a reality:

• George A. Fuller Company as the Main Contractor
• Jaros, Baum & Bolles in charge of MEP Engineering

The Lever House can be categorized as an International Style building.

The Lever House was completed in 1952. By 1952 the International Style movement had already left its early days behind and could be considered a mature movement, which does not mean it was loved and accepted by everyone, on the contrary. The International Style was accepted by the architecture community way before it was by the general public, and it is therefore likely that the Lever House was not well received by everyone at the time.

The Lever House uses a frame structure made of steel columns and reinforced concrete slabs.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

The facade uses a non-load bearing curtain wall system. This means the curtain wall modules are anchored to the building's structural frame, typically by being attached to the edge of the floor slabs. The curtain wall system connects to the slabs using brackets, anchors, and mullions, which transfer the loads imposed by wind and temperature changes, to the building's primary structural elements.

This setup allows the curtain wall to accommodate differential movement between the facade and the structural frame, such as thermal expansion, floor deflection, or sway from wind forces. This system's integration with the slab edges also allows for continuous insulation and weatherproofing layers.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a curtain wall, that as we already mentioned, was only the second curtain wall to be installed in the city.

This alternating composition of dark and light elements creates a horizontally-ribbed facade, but at the same time, the shiny steel millions create a sub-grid of vertical lines. These two orders combined give the facade texture and rhythm .