East Coast Modernism
New York and the Harvard Five

The East Coast was enthusiastic about its brand of Modernism.  The 1952 issue of Holiday Magazine reported on the issue.  “What is a house?  Most Americans, given this apparently easy question, would probably draw a picture- white clapboards, peaked shingle roof, red brick chimney, flagstone walk and green shutters- announce comfortably,  ‘There.  That’s a house.’  But the residents of New Canaan, Connecticut, a 300-year-old Colonial village with an extremely high percentage of white clapboard and green-shutter houses, would not be so positive.  They would be more likely to launch into an enthusiastic discussion of Mies van der Rohe, dropped girders, Thermopane glass and ‘planned environment,’ or into a disgusted denunciation of “cantilevered crackerboxes.”  Then they would take you out in a car and show you some of their houses.  Because New Canaan, to its considerable surprise, has become an architects’ battleground, and everyone talks houses.”

The Harvard Five inadvertently created and thrived in this environment.  Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson and Eliot Noyes built houses for themselves and their clients in New Canaan, Connecticut.  They produced some of the best known landmark designs of the 20th century in staunchly conservative New England.  The first modern house tour was held in 1949.  The public and press were riveted then and still are today.

New York and Boston weren’t the testing ground for Modernism that Chicago had been, but both became home to some of the most seminal works of Modernism in the United States.  Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, completed in 1958, was his first experiment in high-rise office space, given his previous success with the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago.  The Seagram Building has come to be seen as the quintessential 20th-Century skyscraper.  Countless Manhattan skyscrapers have been erected in the model of the Seagram building, and it provided a prototype for the office buildings Mies would build intensively over the next decade.

SOM had its successes in Manhattan as well.  Curtain walls and open, grid-based interiors became their trademark.  The Lever House, completed in 1952, sealed their reputation for prestigious corporate statements.  The transparent facades, celebrating the symbolism of the cleanliness of soap, were an instant success and glass revolutionized a district previously defined by limestone.