Repositioning Mid-Century Manhattan

Harvard GSD

Between roughly 1950 and 1970, New York produced the most coherent body of commercial architecture in its history. Lever House and Seagram established the type, the 1961 Zoning Resolution codified the plaza that came with it, and within two decades several hundred towers were built on that logic, most of them competent, a few of them extraordinary, and only a handful of them landmarked. This studio takes that inventory as its subject. The buildings are structurally sound and superbly located,…