1952 speech at the Waldorf Astoria, while Edward P. Morgan said the same year that "a 10-year-old boy could have done better with a Meccano set". Architectural critic Lewis Mumford, writing for The New Yorker in 1958, found the slab "curiously transitory and ephemeral". Henry Hope Reed Jr., in his 1959 book The Golden City, contrasted a picture of Lever House with one of the Postum Building at 250 Park Avenue, captioning Lever House only with the words "no comment". In 1961, art historian Vincent Scully said Lever House's construction divided the landscape of Park Avenue without regard to the existing architecture. In 2022, Audrey Wachs of Curbed wrote: "In recent years, Lever House has become more of a landmark than a functional office tower", especially considering that the building's floors were too small to accommodate many modern companies' needs. Architectural recognition In 1952, the year of Lever House's completion, Office Management and Equipment magazine gave the building an award for "Office of the Year". The American Institute of Architects (AIA) gave the building an Honor Award the same year. Lever House also received the Fifth Avenue Association's award for "best New York building" constructed between 1952 and 1953. The AIA further recognized Lever House in 1980 with a Twenty-five Year Award. As Yale School of Architecture professor Elihu Rubin told Time magazine in 2022, "There’s probably hardly a survey course in American architecture that doesn’t mention Lever House." Design influence According to the LPC, Lever House's design was widely seen by historians as a major advancement in the International Style. Charles Jencks called Lever House's curtain wall a step in "penultimate development and acceptance" of the International Style, while Robert Furneaux Jordan felt the building's court "set a precedent that may lift New York to a new level among world capitals". Furthermore, following Lever House's completion, numerous glass wall skyscrapers were built in New York City and elsewhere. The surrounding stretch of Park Avenue became developed with commercial buildings. Many of the residential structures on Park Avenue were replaced with largely commercial International Style skyscrapers during the 1950s and 1960s. Those structures included the Seagram Building, whose co-designer Philip Johnson specifically cited the construction of Lever House as a forebear. Lever House's design was also copied internationally: as Nicholas Adams wrote in 2019, "Lever House had represented a clarion call for modernity, and it was widely imitated." These structures