Essay Redemption Task

In no more than 500 words describe the Seagram Building in relation to Louis Sullivan's "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered".
Mies van der Rohe - Seagram Building 1969

In this text Sullivan breaks down "the tall office building", used as an enveloping statement to apply to any building in this category, to its most basic elements and the reasons for them. He states that essentially "offices are necessary for the transaction of business" and that the invention and construction of elevators makes vertical travel "easy and comfortable". He continues to talk about materials and advances in technology that make the construction of such large scale buildings completely normal and that with limited ground space the only way to build is up. This reigns true with the Seagram building and its thirty-eight floors. It was originally erected as the home of Canadian distillers Joseph E. Seagram's & Sons, also fitting in with Sullivan's idea that an office building is "necessary for the transaction of business".
He continues to talk about the floors within a building, a basement for boilers and power supplies etc, a ground floor for the friendly face of a shop or bank, a second floor for offices that is split into various sub divisions, this floor can be repeated numerous times before the final floor. He then states that the 'circulatory system completes itself and makes its grand turn" at which the attic is the top room, it too is filled with various pipes and paraphernalia to ensure the building is light, heated, safe etc.
Obviously a building must have an entrance and he describes this as "a main aperture or entrance common to all the occupants or patrons of the building". This continues his notion that there are a number of specific things that are present in all tall office buildings that give them the same characteristics; he presents them almost a recipe for building. Again these things reign true with the Seagram building in that its first floor is open to the public while its upper floor are delegated to the office workers arguably the actual business of the building. This is exaggerated further by his formula that "all things in nature have a shape, that is to say, a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other." Essentially this is stating that the shape and form of the building, as is the case with a persons body or facial features, defines them as what they are which in turn means that we can tell them from one and other. This should also be linked with one of Sullivan's most notable quotes that "form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change."
The Seagram building is a perfect example of modernist architecture and cannot be viewed in any other way, it can be seen in the light of Sullivan's text as a "tall office building" because it is. Its initial design and build was for the purpose of business and it still stands today for these reasons, its form follows its function and its function is business.