60 OFFICE DESIGN
Bottom The current Action Ofice system is available from Herman Miller in the Americas, Middle East and Africa
Below An Eames Executive Chair. Charles Eames originally designed it as a favour to his friend Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines, hence why it was known as the ‘Time Life’ chair
IT WAS BACK in the 1950s when – suddenly – along came sophisticated interior designs for high-rise offices in Manhattan, specifically on 6th Avenue in New York and the 48 storeys at number 1271. Designed by the Rockefeller family’s architects, Harrison & Abramowitz & Harris, the Time & Life Building, with its 30 elevators, opened in 1959, two streets over from the Madison Avenue that was synonymous with the advertising industry. Home to Time magazine, then one of the most successful magazines in the world, it became the setting for Mad Men, the drama about everyone’s favourite mid-century television ad agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Te interior raised everyone’s sights, blazed new trails, and was produced with a strict discipline; the client was prepared to tolerate genius when he saw it. Gerald Luss was that genius. Six decades
later and hardly anything seen there today can match the sleek, ambitious style that defined the place, the people who worked there, and the people who made it. Meanwhile, over on Park Avenue, the
1950s was a time when the international style had its moment in the sun. New York had reinvented itself, setting the standard for office buildings to follow. Tis was to be the future. A series of tall, conspicuous, highly disciplined buildings were being completed, with uniform grids, structural clarity and great technical excellence. Lever House, designed by Natalie de Blois at SOM with a little help from Gordon Bunshaft, opened in 1952, with the Union Carbide Building and the Pepsi-Cola Building designed by the same team opening in 1960. Te Pepsi building was perhaps the ultimate in refinement of proportion and elegance of materials in the cladding of its steel frame,
but all three typified a weightlessness in style, whereas the Seagram Building, that was being built at the same time as the Time & Life Building and opened just a few months earlier, was deliberately perceptible solidity. Tey all marked the beginning of a new architectural era – curtain wall one- upmanship, skyscrapers as superlatives – that rethought the future of building, defining a corporate aesthetic and establishing an office typology for decades to come, created by architects from the outside in. Designed for maximum efficiency rather than maximum rentability, the building was an advertisement in itself. Yet the modernity of these buildings was not matched by the interiors – witness the executive suites where senior management sat walled in by rosewood panelling, everything signalling solidity, power and wealth: tradition. Far less elegant than any of these, it was the Time & Life Building that had an interior that changed space planning and interior design for a very long time. Luss was the master of mid-century
modern interior design. He set the tone for post-war office style. He brought order by introducing a three by four grid to divide the floors (derived from the PSFS Building in Philadelphia), each section serviced by electricity, fire control and lighting. Lightweight walls could be easily reconfigured. Hyper-rationalist, it was by no means a cage. Luss designed the layouts, the desks, the chairs and other furnishings: they were all lightweight, easy to clean, and easy to move around. He chose bright colours and good fabrics. Help was on hand: Alexander Girard,
‘Sandro’, created fabrics for the furniture; Giovanni ‘Gio’ Ponti was responsible for the
PHOTO: © HERMAN MILLER
PHOTO: © THE MILLERKNOLL ARCHIVES
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