The CBS Building in New York was Saarinen's first skyscraper. "I want to build a simpler building than any that's ever been built, including the Seagram Building," he told Philip Johnson, who had recently assisted Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Tower. CBS is undoubtedly simple, a black extrusion that shoots straight up out of the ground, 38 stories. But its simplicity is also its failure; not for the first time, Saarinen's insistence on reinventing the wheel was his undoing. As Johnson once pointed out, the CBS Building lacks a top and a bottom. It also lacks a proper entrance; prosaic revolving doors are squeezed into 5-foot spaces between the V-shaped columns. Like Seagram, the building has a podium, but unlike almost any building anywhere, it is not elevated but unpleasantly sunk—2 feet below the sidewalk. New Yorkers call the building "Black Rock," referring to the dark tinted glass and rough black granite. It is a nickname that also captures the building's implacable, gloomy, and slightly threatening presence.