January 17, 1985

In the face of a declining demand for liquor, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Inc., the American subsidiary of the Canadian-based Seagram Company Ltd., yesterday announced a major reorganization plan. The company, which is a unit of the world's largest producer and marketer of distilled spirits and wines, will abandon its old sales techniques for a new approach that will group brands according to market strategies. ''We believe we can operate more profitably in this increasingly competitive market through an internally complementary rather than competitive marketing approach,'' said Edgar Bronfman Jr., president of the House of Seagram, the company's United States spirits marketing and manufacturing unit. A change at Seagram was anticipated when the 29-year-old Mr. Bronfman became president last July of the giant distilling company.

DURING the day, they work on large architecture projects that range from the design of a sprawling 6,000-square-foot Sutton Place apartment and the conversion of a former hospital into condominiums to the design and planning of a cluster of buildings for a small college campus. At night, four of the architects who work at Paul Segal Associates return to their own homes - a tiny studio in Greenwich Village, a 19th-century house in Brooklyn, an apartment on the Upper West Side and an up-to-the-minute post-modernist loft in Lower Manhattan. Compared with their professional projects, their own living spaces may be modest in scale and budget. But in the design of their homes the four architects (they are among 14 employees of the firm) share a professional interest in long-term design solutions, a respect for the past and a sense of freewheeling experimentation. They also tend to worry about more storage space and don't think of their homes as being finished. All seem to have green thumbs, a fondness for columns and a knack for such simple design solutions as beds supported by architects' files.

''THE first thing we did was delist our phone number, even before we moved in,'' says Thomas Plocek about his new house, designed by the Princeton, N.J., architect Michael Graves. The Ploceks were receiving too many calls from people asking to visit a house that was famous almost as soon as it came off Mr. Graves's drawing boards. ''We didn't anticipate the visitors because we weren't aware it would be the avant-garde architectural statement it apparently is,'' says Mr. Plocek, a manufacturer of raw materials for synthetic fragrances. ''We were building it for ourselves, but as the situation developed, it was of interest to people beyond just us. I don't think we've ever turned anyone away.'' Soon after they moved in, for example, the graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Architecture visited the large, impressively sited post-modern structure.

A majority of New York City's residents believe that Mayor Koch deserves to be re-elected to a third term, according to a New York Times poll. At the same time, many residents say the city is doing a poor job of delivering some major services, although few hold the Mayor directly accountable. When those surveyed in the poll were asked separately for their opinions of a number of public officials, the Mayor was rated favorably by two-thirds of the respondents - well above the rating received by any of his leading potential challengers. The Mayor's standing was unusually high for any elected official who has been in such a visible administrative government position for seven years, and he ranked about as well as he did in a Times poll soon after he was returned to office in a landslide victory in 1981. Other Officials Rated Among the other officials, two of Mr. Koch's potential challengers - City Council President Carol Bellamy and Herman Badillo, a former Bronx Borough President, Congressman and Deputy Mayor - were viewed favorably by 38 percent and 34 percent, respectively, of the 1,329 New York City residents whom The Times polled by telephone from Jan. 5 to 10. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

A dispatch from Paris on Dec. 31 about Unesco misattributed a report that Libya had offered to give the agency $1 million. The information came not from Unesco's director general, Amadou Mahtar M'Bow, but from sources attending a conference of Islamic foreign ministers in Sana, Yemen.