Union Carbide Building (now Chase Manhattan Bank)
OFTEN GLOSSED over as a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill clone of the Seagram Building, the Union Carbide is a bold commitment to Internationalism as a sculptural aesthetic. Within the Miesian architectural framework of pure structuralism, SOM’s principal p
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f t e n g l o s s e d over as a Skidmore, Owings & Merrill clone of the Seagram Building, the Union Carbide is a bold commitment to Internationalism as a sculptural aesthetic. Within the Miesian architectural framework of pure structuralism, SOM’s principal partner Gordon Bunshaft was interested in pursuing the same esoteric questions that minimalist sculptors such as Tony Smith, David Smith, Donald Judd, and Isamu Noguchi were engaging with: What is the nature of the relationship between viewer and object; What are the effects of scale; What constitutes a material’s surface; and What is the interplay between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms? The 25-foot-high glass-walled lobby, designed by Natalie de Blois, one of the few women in the man’s world of Internationalism, and the interior designer Jack G. Dunbar, neatly articulates the building’s structure with color. The weightless, wraparound skin of the 41-story tower’s lobby is clear glass, the supporting
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columns are black matte finish, the plaza and lobby floor are gray granite, the soffits are white, the trim is stainless steel, and the walls of the elevator core are a startling red under a luminous white plastic ceiling. Like the minimalists, Bunshaft was beginning to look at his buildings simply as objects in the world. His materials become increasingly specific, and are used for their objective qualities. As Donald Judd said of sculpture in the same period: “Most of the work involves new materials, either recent inventions or things not used before in art. . . . Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—Formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.” The red elevator core is aggressive in Judd’s sense, because it confronts us with the issue of surface. As the critic Michael Fried points out in Art and Objecthood, “the color of a given sculpture, whether applied or in the natural state of the material, is identical with its surface; and inasmuch as all objects have surface, awareness of the sculpture’s surface implies its objecthood.” Particularly at night, when the red core glows like a rocket flame under the black bulk of the building, we are confronted with the objecthood of this building. The building is based on a five-foot module with 20-foot-wide by 40-foot-deep bays, but the big red core is what turns an ordinary structure into a sculptural object. We are first challenged by the question of its scale: How big is it, and how big are we in relation to it? Tony Smith was once questioned about his six-foot cube Die (1962), “Why didn’t you make it larger so that it would loom over the observer?” “I was not making a monument,” Smith said. “Then why didn’t you make it smaller so that the observer could see over the top?” “I was not making an object,” Smith said. Because the Union Carbide disori
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