Review: Building Seagram, by Phyllis Lambert

Abstract

Phyllis Lambert. Building Seagram New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013, 320 pp., 140 b/w and 56 color illus. $65.00, ISBN 9780300167672 “Can there be a need for yet another book on Mies van der Rohe, who has been more exhaustively written about than any other of the hero figures of modern architecture?”1 J. M. Richards, the British critic and editor of Architectural Review , asked this question in 1975—thirty-eight years ago. Since then, the literature on Mies has grown substantially, and the most recent addition to it, Phyllis Lambert’s sumptuous monograph, Building Seagram , demonstrates once more that there is still plenty about Mies, his work, and its context to be uncovered.2 No one could tell the history of the most seminal office building of the twentieth century as well as Lambert, who selected the architect in 1954 and then worked closely with all participants as director of planning and representative of the client, her father, Samuel Bronfman, the president of Seagram. The experience changed her life. She went on to study architecture under Mies at IIT and immediately afterward designed the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts (known today as the Segal Centre for Performing Arts) in Montreal. She became an architectural historian, an active preservationist, and the founding director and main supporter of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the premier research center for architectural history and theory in the world. The story of how the young Parisian art student rose up against her father, whose “fierce temper” had terrified her as a child, and interfered in his selection of an architect for the new company headquarters in New York, is so well known that it long ago assumed the quality of an architectural myth, equal to, perhaps, the account of Frank L. Wright sketching his famous perspective of Fallingwater between a phone call from the client, Edgar Kaufmann, and his arrival at Wright’s home half an hour …