In New York City, where restaurants last an average of two years and seldom more than seven, a dining establishment that survives for half a century might seem a culinary Methuselah. However, the 2009 Zagat guide lists no fewer than 75 Gotham restaurants at least 50 years old, a roster to which must now be added the Four Seasons, which opened on July 20, 1959, on the ground floor of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building. Two hundred seasons later, this visionary fusion of high-style American design and haute American cuisine offers another object lesson: As our civic realm is increasingly compromised by commercialism, the enduringly elevated tone of the The Four Seasons makes it a loftier enterprise than some cultural institutions.

Unrelated to the eponymous hotel chain founded in 1961, The Four Seasons recast luxury dining in an entirely new scenario, with contemporary design given the starring role. Though usually ascribed to Johnson alone, this complex project was actually a collaboration among several of Midcentury Modernism’s brightest lights: interior decorator William Pahlmann, a follower of Jean-Michel Frank, who made a Minimalist water feature the epicenter of the restaurant’s jaw-dropping Pool Room; industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable (husband of Ada Louise, pioneering New York Times architecture critic), whose suavely modeled table settings feature what I consider the Martini glass of the century; plus landscape architect Karl Linn and horticulturist Everett Lawson Conklin, whose wow-inducing plantings underscored the restaurant’s seasonal conceit.