In the 1950s the steel and glass architecture of the international modern movement was adopted as the new image of corporate America. The Lever House of 1952 designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill was the first project to offer the modernist image of efficiency and standardisation to a corporate client.

In the 1950s and 60s a number of these hermetically sealed ‘glass boxes’ were built in New York and expressed the city’s commercial and cultural dominance. The large sculpture on the plaza and the elegant high modernist interior, epitomised by interior designers such as the Knoll planning unit, became the new international language of business and success.

With the widespread use of air-conditioning and fluorescent lighting, these new high-rise buildings could have highly efficient deep and open floors. There was now no longer an imperative to have natural lighting, whether from windows or skylights, or to be near an opening window for ventilation. The suspended ceiling took over these functions, containing lighting and air distribution. The office had successfully become fully autonomous from the exterior environment.

This formula was influential worldwide. The 1967 film Playtime by Jacques Tati pokes fun at this idea of the Modernist city, following a group of American tourists touring a steel and glass metropolis looking for the ‘real’ Paris.

The Chase Manhattan Bank of 1961 illustrates the essentially hierarchical nature of American business, where administrative and clerical staff still worked in open pools, managers in partitioned offices and executives in the luxury of the sixtieth floor.

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