His work on the interiors of the Time-Life Building helped set the tone for postwar office style and provided a model for the set of “Mad Men.”
His work on the interiors of the Time-Life Building helped set the tone for postwar office style and provided a model for the set of “Mad Men.”
His work on the interiors of the Time-Life Building helped set the tone for postwar office style and provided a model for the set of “Mad Men.”
Gerald Luss, whose sophisticated designs for Manhattan high-rise offices and lush layouts for residential interiors helped define the look known as midcentury modern — particularly his plan for the Time-Life offices, which was so true to its era that it provided the model for the sets of “Mad Men” — died on April 1 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
His wife, Susan Luss, confirmed the death.
Mr. Luss trained as an architect, and while he built only one notable structure — his own hillside home in Ossining, N.Y. — his interior designs went far beyond the mere placement of tables and chairs.
For the Time-Life offices, at 1271 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan, he brought order to what might have been chaos, given the glass-and-steel tower’s massive wide-open floors.
Using what he called the plenum system, he divided the floor into a grid, with each three-by-four-foot module serviced by electricity, fire control and lighting. Lightweight walls could be easily reconfigured using the grids.
His interior, however, was no hyper-rationalist cage. He decorated the walls with murals by artists like Josef Albers and Fritz Glarner. Even the lowliest clerk could walk along rich plush carpets or gaze down on the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue to most New Yorkers) like a royal.