Architecture Inspiration

I am a huge fan of architecture. I wanted to be an architect, began studying it and then quickly dropped it when I realized the amount of math involved and the fact that I'd be spending the first 30 years of my career designing sprinkler systems. My love for the art form has never died however, and I think that a lot of my inspiration springs from architecture and the designs of my favorite architects. Interior design and architecture are always in conversation with one another and the majority of architects also do interior design - therefore, I think I will begin to do some posts about my favorite buildings here in New York.

For the first in this new series, I present to you my number one favorite building in New York City: The Seagram Building.

Designed in 1958, by my favorite architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Seagram building was definately a structure before its time. It's located at 53rd and Park and was the first building in New York to use a glass curtain for an exterior wall. Van der Rohe pioneered the idea of moving the load bearing walls of a structure from the outside (as masonary had done) to the core of the building (using reinforced steel) therefore allowing facades made entirely of glass, as foreseen by the visionaries of Modern Movement, like Mies himself. Between the windows, there are vertical decorative bronze I-profiled beams attached to the mullions to emphasize the vertical rise of the facade. Van der Rohe personally stated that this was his only building in the United States which met exactly his European standards.