Even before beginning to design buildings, Johnson displayed his influence as the first director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he promoted the work of the father of modern architecture Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the creator of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius.
Both ended up in exile in the US fleeing from Nazism in their native Germany. But thanks to this misadventure, the symbol building of the industrial boom of the 50s and 60s in the USA was born. In 1958 Mies van der Rohe and Johnson teamed up to design the Seagrams Building. The minimalist steel and glass office tower at 357 Park Avenue that spurred the hiring of big-name architects by New York real estate investors.
Johnson himself planted the island of Manhattan with works that raised eyebrows when they were inaugurated, but which have ended up being icons of postmodernism for their mixture of styles without complexes. The prime example was the Sony Building skyscraper, originally AT
His signature remained in others such as the Lipstick Building on Third Avenue, nicknamed with the English word for lipstick because of its elliptical shape and its enameled red color; or the Bobst Library in Washington Square, a windowless hulking brownstone.
At that time, it was the large corporations that hired the most prestigious architects in the world to build their headquarters. But as builders realized the great benefits of apartment buildings, they were called upon to design their residential versions as well. This phenomenon is more active than ever.
The city of skyscrapers has experienced a boom in high-end residential construction in recent years not seen since the 2008 recession when most projects were halted due to the financial crisis.
The list of ‘starchitects’ that have been launched into home design has not stopped increasing. Several Pritzker Prize winners such as the Italian Renzo Piano, the Iraqi Zaha Hadid, the Brazilian Álvaro Siza or the Frenchman Jean Nouvel have built their first residential works in Manhattan.
For developers, their signatures confer instant prestige to buildings, increase profits and set new standards in neighborhoods previously ignored by millionaires in search of exclusivity.
These types of residential buildings have an average price per square foot (0.092 square meters) of $2,402 (2,160 euros), well above the average of $1,735 (1,560 euros) for the same size of apartments without a known author, according to City Realty data.
The powerful builder and art collector Edward Minskoff was one of the pioneers. “I want to hire a world-class architect, because there’s a very high probability that I’ll move there,” he told The New York Times as he tried to put up an apartment building in the West Village. He ended up signing the British architect David Chipperfield, winner of the ‘nobel’ for architecture this year, to design a building with only five floors.
It was the first residential project in the city by the author of the ‘Veles e Vents’ building, built in the Port of Valencia for the 2007 Copa América. He has just inaugurated ‘The Bryan’, a 32-story mixed-use tower in the central park of the same name. The rush to hire one of these architects has also led to dramatic additions to the city’s skyline.
This was what happened with the super tall and super thin 432 Park Avenue skyscraper, the first of its kind built in 2016 by the Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly. Now there are almost a dozen of these constructions, paradigm of the excess of builders to please millionaires. “Unholy spires”, they have been called by the prestigious American architect Steven Holl, who has not yet received a commission to build one of these vertiginous works. The Manhattan map is full of signature buildings that often go unnoticed. These are the most impressive or the most recent.
