Lever House is an office building at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, completed in 1952 as the headquarters of the soap manufacturer Lever Brothers, a subsidiary of Unilever. Designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, it stands 307 feet tall in the International Style and was only the second high rise in New York City to use a glass curtain wall, after the United Nations Secretariat Building. Its slender slab tower occupies just a quarter of its site, lifted above a low horizontal base, a plan that placed every office within 25 feet of a window. The building proved so influential that it helped convert Park Avenue from a street of masonry apartment blocks into one dominated by glass and steel office towers, and a 1980s proposal to demolish it for a larger replacement was defeated when the city narrowly designated it a landmark in 1982.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Uses Element
Bunshafts 1952 design paired a stainless-steel frame with blue-green glass curtain walls, an early and influential combination for the type.
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