Phyllis Lambert and The Seagram Building’s storied history

By Robert Fulford
April 13, 2013

Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phyllis Lambert in front of an image of the model for the Seagram building, New
York, 1955. Fonds Phyllis Lambert, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. © United Press International

Two men, each of them an unquestioned giant in his own world, cast tall shadows over Phyllis Lambert’s
life when she was a young woman. One was her father, Sam Bronfman, the choleric Montreal whisky
king, who wanted to build a New York headquarters for his companies. The other was Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, a stern, forbidding German-American architect, who ended up designing it.

Her handsomely illustrated book, Building Seagram (Yale University Press), chronicles a golden moment
in architectural history, the creation of a masterpiece skyscraper on Park Avenue. Her role in this story
has been a legend among architects and their admirers for decades: She picked Mies, she served as
director of planning for the building and she chose the art collection that adorned it.

All that would seem natural for the aggressive, confident, opinionated Phyllis Lambert of today, an
architect who is famous as an urban preservationist and the creator of the unique Canadian Centre for
Architecture in Montreal. But when the Seagram building went up, half a century ago, she was a rookie
who thrust herself into the middle of a terrifying process that could have gone all wrong.
From the beginning she saw similarities, some quite promising, in Bronfman and Mies. “Both men had a
pervasive sense of quality, and both understood the need to spend money to obtain it.” They were both
self-taught, absorbed entirely in their work. “Neither gave praise nor was a good parent: my father was
for all intents and purposes physically absent; his strong personality and fierce temper terrified his
children; Mies merely neglected his.”

She knew about her father’s cultural ambitions. On Peel Street in Montreal he did business in a folkloric
imitation of a 16th-century Scottish baronial castle, with turrets and narrow vertical windows for
shooting arrows. It was built for him in the 1920s, after he formed a partnership with the owners of an
ancient Scotch distillery.

In 1954, Lambert was living in Paris, 27 years old, recently divorced, trying to become a sculptor, when
her father sent her the tentative drawings for his new headquarters. She was horrified, and angry.
Nothing about it was impressive. Obviously, he was planning a boring corporate slab. She replied with a
letter of eight single-spaced typewritten pages. Near the top it said, “NO NO NO NO NO.”

Her tone was wildly audacious. She begged him to create a building of lightness and elegance, an
expression of the best in contemporary society. “You have a great responsibility,” she wrote. The
building should serve not only the Seagran employees but all the people, New Yorkers and the rest of
the world. If he didn’t see it that way, she advised, there was no point in going on.

It’s an impressive letter, intelligent as well as passionate. A facsimile of the messy typescript appears in
Building Seagram, as it should. Certainly it’s a historic document. But it did not at first have precisely the
desired result.

“My father’s response was to telephone and ask me to come back from Paris to choose the marble for
the ground floor.” Apparently he thought that would please her. Instead, she somehow persuaded him
to give her a much bigger job. As the client’s daughter she could exercise a special authority but her
presence and her opinions must have seemed an effrontery to many of the middle-aged gents doing the
work. Still, Bronfman was impressed by the plans she supervised. He said this should be the crowning
glory of everyone concerned, including himself. This meant he would spend freely enough ($36-million,
then a vast sum for a building) to provide first-class construction materials. Selecting the architect was
crucial. Before Lambert was involved, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed himself, arguing for a building of 100
storeys, to be the biggest in the world. Seagram turned him down. Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen
both pitched their ideas to Lambert and she considered other mid-century stars, including Louis Kahn
and Le Corbusier, before settling on Mies. To help him with the lighting and the interiors, Mies chose
Philip Johnson, who was then the world’s most passionate admirer of Mies (and a stern critic of him
later).

After four years, the building was in place, 38 storeys sheathed in bronze and glass, with its exquisitely
organized plaza. It remains one of the great American buildings and the only structure Mies van der
Rohe ever built in New York.

Lambert takes special pride in the art that was collected and displayed to the public. Photographs in the
book show sculpture on the plaza by Barnett Newman, Jean Dubuffet, Tony Smith and others. She
commissioned Mark Rothko to make paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant but he later withdrew
and paid back his fee. On reflection he didn’t want people eating in a room with his art.
In 1957, Lambert visited Cannes and asked Picasso to make four sculptures. They agreed on details but
he never delivered. Johnson claimed that Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s mistress and future wife, thought
she saw his eye alight on the young Canadian woman; she apparently ruled that Lambert and Picasso
must not meet again. Instead Lambert acquired a handsome stage curtain that Picasso painted in 1919
for Serge Diaghilev’s ballet, Le Tricorne. In 1928, when Diaghilev’s money was running out, he sold the
curtain to a Swiss collector. It went through several owners before 1957, when Lambert bought it. The
director of the Museum of Modern Art said she could get it for $15,000 but she paid the asking price of
$50,000. It’s been hanging on the first floor since the building opened. For those who love this kind of
cultural detail, like me, Lambert devotes four pages to Le Tricorne.

She’s right to say that the Seagram building set a good example for architects. Alas, few of them
followed it with any loyalty. They learned little from its subtle proportions, its refined details and the
generous plaza that created a lovely oasis on the city grid. Architects instead copied the glass curtain
walls, which could be cheaply imitated, and ignored the grace that made the best Mies buildings great.
Contemplating the look-alike glass towers now covering much of the planet adds a melancholy subtext
to a book that celebrates a genuine triumph.

Fulford, Robert. “Phyllis Lambert and The Seagram Building’s storied history.” National Post (April 9, 2013) [online].

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/04/09/fulford-the-seagram-buildings-storeyed-history/