In 1952, SOM’s Lever House landed like a cool slab of wirecut soap hygienically set on a plinth along the stony, tony canyon of Park Avenue. Its post-war transcendence was widely lauded. Lewis Mumford’s review for The New Yorker, published in the August 8, 1952, issue and resurrected in Alexandra Lange’s Writing About Architecture, called it “a building of outstanding qualities, mechanical, aesthetic, [and] human.” The following summer, while romancing Eero Saarinen, Aline B. Louchheim captured the thoughts of Nikolaus Pevsner about the building in The New York Times: “‘The fact that such an extraordinary building was commissioned from “a firm” rather than an individual genius […]
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