Union Carbide Building

Reception

When the building was completed, Architectural Record said that "the detailing is a further step in the direction of simplification and clarity of statement" compared to previous designs by SOM. New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in 1960, said that 270 Park Avenue, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, and 28 Liberty Street all had a "still too-rare esthetic excellence". The Fifth Avenue Association called the Union Carbide Building the best edifice constructed on Park Avenue between 1960 and 1961. The design was frequently likened to the Seagram Building, and a writer for The Wall Street Journal said: "There is no doubt that glass has been firmly associated with the post-World War II luxury office building." After Chase and Chemical's merger in 1995, the journalist David W. Dunlap wrote that the Seagram Building, Lever House, and the Union Carbide Building along Park Avenue "epitomized New York at the peak of its economic might and worldwide prowess". Anthony Paletta of The Wall Street Journal said in 2013 that "the Union Carbide Building is a bracing exemplar of postwar corporate modernism".