Charles & Ray Eames

When Henry Luce needed someone to make a design statement for Time Inc.’s new headquar-

ters, he turned to two people who impressed him and also happened to owe him a favor—the married design team of Charles and Ray Eames. A year earlier, he had let the Eameses mine Time Inc.’s vast photo library for images for a film they were making. Now, Luce asked the couple to design Time Inc.’s reception areas and executive chairs. The former are long gone, but the hyper-plush latter live on courtesy of furniture maker Herman Miller, Inc. Among their fans was Luce’s son Hank, who carted off to London

three Time-Life Lobby Chairs in 1966. (Hank Luce was Time’s new bureau chief there.) Not a bad gig for the daughter of a vaudeville theater owner from California and the son of a rail-

road security officer from St. Louis, but it’s no surprise they landed it. By the time they met at Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1940, both had shown promise: Ray as an abstract painter, Charles as an industrial designer. Along with friend Eero Saarinen, designer of the St. Louis Arch and dozens of other mid-century architectural marvels, Charles later garnered first place honors for the Eames’s plywood “organic chair” at a MoMA-sponsored show. The Eameses would also use plywood to craft innovative, lightweight leg splints for injured U. S. Navy sailors in World War II.

CHARLES AND RAY Eames (top left); the famous Eames Executive Chair (top right and above), known better as the Time-Life Lobby Chair, was an iteration of the Eames Lounge Chair, commissioned by Herman Miller and released in 1956. Charles Eames tweaked the design to create the Lobby Chair: a taller, more upright, and narrower version, suitable for an office setting rather than a men’s club or living room. It was both comfortable and functional, with luxe Scottish black leather down-filled upholstery and an aluminum frame on a swivel base.

A TIME INC. art department bathed in light (left). A private office and secretary’s desk separated by a modular wall partition (above). The Life photo lab (right).

TIME INC. ENJOYED the use of the 250-seat auditorium atop the tower’s seven-story extension, which wraps around its western and northern flanks. That space, which included meeting areas and a bar, was orchestrated in high mid-century modern style by the Italian designer Gio Ponti.

THE REMODELED AUDITORIUM has a long outdoor deck with 270-degree views (left). Ponti designed the original space with flexibility in mind (right); the rooms could be set for banquets, smaller receptions, or theater seating, and were suitable for feting the great and the good, including John F. Kennedy shown here at the elbow of host Henry Luce (above).

In the early years, an eclectic mix of tenants came and went in the building. Initially, the highest office floor, 46, housed Whitney Communications, headed by John Hay Whitney, whose résumé included stints as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, president of the Museum of Modern Art, and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the nation’s biggest philanthropies, occupied floors 41 and 42 at a time when the focus of its work was shifting toward agriculture. That meant, among other projects, funding for a new international rice institute in Asia, whose seeds were later credited with aiding the green revolution that helped stave off famines worldwide. Several ad agencies, including McCann Erickson Inc. on 38, spread their creative wings in 1271. Oil-industry firms—a leading tenant category across all of Rockefeller Center from its very earliest days—were also well represented. In addition to the American Petroleum Institute, Shell Oil had floors 2 and 3, and Reed Roller Bit, maker of oil-well drilling bits, found a home on 37.

THE FIRST PEOPLE staff meeting in the office of founding managing editor Dick Stolley (behind desk), March 1, 1974 (left).

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED MANAGING editor Gilbert Rogin (left) and assistant managing editor Ken Rudeen review layouts, April 23, 1981 (above).