The genius of Eero Saarinen was rewarded twice last week. The New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented his widow, Aline, with its Medal of Honor, a tribute to the "combined esthetic delights and technical rewards" of Saarinen's diverse forms. And the Columbia Broadcasting System announced that construction will start this spring on its new 38-story freestanding tower—Saarinen's only building in Manhattan and his only skyscraper.
When Saarinen died at 51 last September, he left a portfolio of projects that include much of his most daring work.† Of these, the CBS building was unique in Saarinen's eyes because "it will be the simplest skyscraper statement in New York," a "vertical leap of masonry and glass." In a "return to solid, massive strength," the structure will be made of granite-clad reinforced concrete instead of structural steel, rising without a break in line from the green-granite faced, sunken plaza surrounding it. Triangular columns carrying wiring, heating and air ducts will rise in the tower's four faces, breaking up the expanse of shimmering glass that gives a cellophane-wrapped look to much that is modern.
No More Wedding Cakes. The CBS Building is one of the first to be built under New York's new zoning resolution, which rewards builders for foot-traffic space in the plaza by allowing a higher, unbroken climb. The old zoning resolution required setbacks as the building rose, and cursed the city with scores of massive wedding cakes that filled their building sites to the sidewalks and threw away all sense of height.
The building's clean design results in part from Saarinen's admiration of the lines of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in Manhattan. Saarinen decided that the only way to best the master was to be even purer. He took as his clue the words of pioneer Skyscraper Designer Louis Sullivan, "a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line." The idea of purity so ruled his design that CBS had to buy two adjoining lots for a utility building, rather than allow the lines of the tower to be interrupted by truck entrances; supplies will be delivered to the building through a subterranean passageway.
Outdoing NBC. The new building's site, at West 52nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, is only two blocks from NBC's 70-story skyscraper in Rockefeller Center. Thus a main goal of the architecture is to make CBS look distinguished in comparison to its lofty rival. The sunken plaza that consumes almost half the space of the tract not only singles the building out but draws the eye downward before it turns upward, adding to the effect of rise.
*Among the works-in-progress: Washington's Dulles Airport, two college buildings at Yale, the Jefferson Memorial Arch in St. Louis, the Trans World Airlines terminal at Idlewild and Lincoln Center theater in Manhattan.