Episode 2416
Lever House
Sat, 2023-Dec-16 00:58 UTC
Length - 2:58
Direct Link
Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.
The featured article for Saturday, 16 December 2023 is Lever House.
Lever House is a 307-foot-tall (94 m) office building at 390 Park Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Constructed from 1950 to 1952, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in the International Style, a 20th-century modern architectural style. It was originally the headquarters of soap company Lever Brothers, a subsidiary of Unilever. Lever House was the second skyscraper in New York City with a glass curtain wall, after the United Nations Secretariat Building.
The building has 21 office stories topped by a triple-height mechanical section. At the ground story is a courtyard and public space, with the second story overhanging the plaza on a set of columns. The remaining stories are designed as a slab occupying the northern one-quarter of the site. The slab design was chosen because it conformed with the city's 1916 Zoning Resolution while avoiding the use of setbacks. There is about 260,000 square feet (24,000 m2) of interior space in Lever House, making it much smaller than comparable office buildings in Midtown Manhattan.
The construction of Lever House changed Park Avenue in Midtown from an avenue with masonry apartment buildings to one with International-style office buildings. Several other structures worldwide copied the building's design. Lever House was intended solely for Lever Brothers' use, and its small size prompted proposals to redevelop the site with a larger skyscraper. The building was nearly demolished in the 1980s, when Fisher Brothers proposed a 40-story tower on the site; afterward, it was narrowly approved as a New York City designated landmark in 1982 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places the next year. In 1997, Unilever relocated most of its offices out of Lever House, and Aby Rosen's RFR Realty took over the building. After SOM renovated the building from 2000 to 2001, Lever House was used as a standard office building with multiple tenants. SOM conducted another renovation in the early 2020s.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:58 UTC on Saturday, 16 December 2023.
For the full current version of the article, see Lever House on Wikipedia.
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Until next time, I'm Ivy Standard.
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