The €88 million ($100 m) revitalization project, by architecture firm SOM, will bring the building into the 21st-century with updates to its ground-floor public plaza and lobby. The building’s third-floor roof terraces overlooking Park Avenue will be joined by a tenant-only club with a lounge, restaurant, and conference venue.

SOM was also involved in the replacement of the building’s glass curtain wall in 2001.

Lever House was one of 50 buildings in the world to receive a twenty-five year award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
When Lever House by SOM (a design collaboration between SOM partner Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois) was opened at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in 1952, the 22-story building was considered especially innovative for its time for two reasons: it was one of the first buildings to reinterpret the urban occupation of a parcel in Manhattan, generating a new public space and gardens, and it was also the second building to show a façade with a glass curtain wall, a model for the construction of skyscrapers in the following decades —its slender steel mullions framing its windows and prominent spandrels are a common sight across corporate Midtown towers today.
 
Lever House is one of our crown jewels, and we are honored to steward this emblem of Modernism into the future. Our team revisited the site 20 years ago to carefully replace the building’s curtain wall, and we view this next phase of retrofitting as the completion of its restoration. We look forward to enhancing its performance while respecting its rich heritage and ushering it into a new chapter.”
Chris Cooper, design partner at SOM, said in a statement

The 21-story, 24,000-square-meter building was purpose-built as the headquarters for Lever Brothers soap company and has remained a shining example of early International Style architecture since its opening

Many of the building’s original details will be restored, and mechanical systems will be updated according to the highest wellness and sustainability standards. Renovations are expected to be finished in early 2023.

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Construction, 1951.
Opening, 29 april 1952.

National Register of Historic Places (NRPH), EE.UU.,2 october 1983.

Renovations are expected to be finished in early 2023.
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Location
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390 Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York City. USA.
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Ezra Stoller. TMRW.BP.
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Gordon Bunshaft was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1909, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a BA and MA in architecture and came under the influence of Lawrence B. Anderson, who fostered an appreciation of modernist design.

Bunshaft worked briefly for Edward Durrell Stone and Raymond Loewy before beginning his forty-two-year career at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In his early years at the firm, he designed buildings for the 1939-40 New York World's Fair and Hostess House, a cadet hospitality center at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois (1941-42). After serving in the Corps of Engineers during World War II, Bunshaft rejoined SOM in 1947. Later that year he moved to the firm's New York office; he became a full partner in 1949. As Lever House's chief designer (1950-1952), Bunshaft was recognized for the first time. In the words of architecture critic Paul Goldberger, this twenty-four-story office tower was "New York's first major commercial structure with a glass curtain wall (preceded only by the United Nations Secretariat), obscuring the solid wall of stonework on Park Avenue, like a vision of a new world.

After Lever House, Bunshaft was involved in the design of several prominent buildings, including the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters (1957) in Bloomfield, Connecticut; the Pepsi-Cola Building (1958-60) on Park Avenue; the United States Air Force Academy (1959) in Colorado Springs; Chase Manhattan Bank Headquarters and Plaza (1960-61) and 140 Broadway (1964-67) in lower Manhattan; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963) at Yale University; the W.R. Grace Building (1973) at West 42nd Street; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (1971) at the University of Texas, Austin; the Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden (1974) in Washington, DC; and the National Commercial Bank (1983) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

He was also awarded the Brunner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1955, and his gold medal in 1984. He received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize, often called the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in 1988, two years before his death.
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Natalie Griffin de Blois (April 2, 1921 – July 22, 2013) was an American architect. De Blois began her career in 1944 at a New York firm, Ketchum, Gina and Sharpe, from which she was fired after "refusing affection" from one of the firm's architects, who asked that she be fired. Shortly thereafter she joined the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). While working at SOM, De Blois was known as a "pioneer" as an architect in the "male-dominated world of architecture". In 1962 she moved to the firm's headquarters in Chicago, where she was soon made a partner at SOM in 1964, working with the firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill until 1974.

Notable projects include the Pepsi Cola headquarters, Lever House, and the Union Carbide Building in New York City, the Equitable Building in Chicago, the lower portions of Ford's world headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, and Connecticut General Life Insurance Company. Headquartered in Bloomfield, Conn.

De Blois joined Neuhaus & Taylor (now known as 3-D International) in Houston in 1974. In 1980, he began teaching at the University of Texas School of Architecture and was a faculty member until 1993. He died at 92 years in Chicago.
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Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) is one of the leading architecture, interior design, engineering, and urban planning firms in the world, with a 75-year reputation for design excellence and a portfolio that includes some of the most important architectural accomplishments of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Since its inception, SOM has been a leader in the research and development of specialized technologies, new processes and innovative ideas, many of which have had a palpable and lasting impact on the design profession and the physical environment.

The firm’s longstanding leadership in design and building technology has been honored with more than 1,700 awards for quality, innovation, and management. The American Institute of Architects has recognized SOM twice with its highest honor, the Architecture Firm Award—in 1962 and again in 1996. The firm maintains offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Abu Dhabi.

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Published on: February 18, 2022
Cite: "SOM obtains the approval of a new rehabilitation of the Lever House" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/som-obtains-approval-a-new-rehabilitation-lever-house> ISSN 1139-6415
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