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Authenticity" has come to be the operative term for describing all sorts of preservation efforts. Yet its meaning remains elusive, largely due to changes in the technology of restoration and adaptive reuse. With the recent renovation of New York's Lever House, which involved a radical facelift for its famous glass and stainless-steel curtain wall, the issue surfaced once again. Is the wholesale substitution of the original skin with a new and improved version legitimate, no matter how close the final result comes to the original appearance? The glass is green-tinted and single-paned, as in the original, but now it is heat-strengthened instead of annealed. And while parts of the underlying curtain-wall structure of carbon steel have been kept--just scraped of rust and recoated--a new aluminum receiver system supplements the old. Nevertheless, Wayne Curtis, in Preservation magazine (September-October 2002), wondered if it were not like replacing a deteriorating stucco wall of a Baroque church with Dryvit.
The debate turns on whether or not we should judge the authenticity of the methods to restore Modern buildings by the same criteria we use for restoring, say, age-old churches crafted by stonemasons. The issue is vexing, since it is only recently that Modern buildings began to be considered qualified for landmark designation. Indeed, Lever House, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's (SOM) Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1952, was one of the first of the crop of Modernist buildings to be "saved." New York's Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) designated the 31-year-old building as a historic landmark in 1983 after it had been threatened by the Fisher Brothers, developers who bought the lease and then produced plans to demolish the 24-story structure. Jackie Onassis and Philip Johnson managed to rally the troops to fight for landmarking, drawing architects to their cause who had previously dismissed preservationists as a bunch of blue-haired ladies in tennis shoes.
A place in skyscraper history
Although short by skyscraper standards, Lever House was the first corporate office building in the International Style idiom to go up in New York City. Granted, Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone's Museum of Modern Art preceded it in 1939, and Wallace Harrison and his team's United Nations Secretariat went up in 1950, but here was a totally wrapped-in-glass...