Lever House in New York City is one of the most influential skyscraper designs in modern American architecture. Lever House is an office building that stands 24 stories high. The structure, completed in 1952, was designed by the American architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Gordon Bunshaft was the chief designer.
Lever House was the first skyscraper in New York City planned around a public plaza and set back from the street. The office tower occupies only about one-fourth of its square one-block site on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The building is supported on slender columns. The elevated horizontal base covers its site to provide pedestrian walkways leading to a public garden court.
The building is among the first and most successful examples of the metal-and-glass curtain wall design. In this type of design, a structural skeleton, most often of steel, supports the building, while the walls provide no support but merely hang like curtains on the frame. On the exterior of Lever House, stainless steel members alternate with blue-green glass curtain panels in precisely proportioned vertical and horizontal ribbons of steel and glass. This exterior makes Lever House one of the most beautiful skyscrapers in the United States.
