Highbrow Skyscraper, Lowbrow Plaza

By: Matthew Battles
April 10, 2009

Susan Sontag pays a visit to the Seagram Building (“gleaming like a switchblade”) to interview architect Philip Johnson. Embedded here with thanks to Joanne McNeil, who posted this at her terrific blog Tomorrow Museum.

Sontag’s visit to the Seagram Building reminded us of another video that captures the way people tame the alienating majesty of its plaza. (Note on nomenclature: “to tame” is hilobrow; “to domesticate” is middlebrow. Taming is something done with a whip and a chair, pistol on hip.) This excerpt comes from the film The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, adapted from a book of the same name by William H. Whyte (author of The Organization Man). Thanks for this clip goes to Jason Kottke for finding and posting.

Tags

architecture, Philip Jonhson, Susan Sontag, William H. Whyte

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Highbrow Skyscraper, Lowbrow Plaza

Categories

Tags