A Personal Stamp on the Skyline
By MARK LAMSTER
Published: April 3, 2013
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Tapping a shaft of white marble in the
lobby of the Seagram Building, the bespoke modern tower she willed into
being more than 50 years ago, Phyllis Lambert was as close to wistful as
her rather unsentimental constitution would allow. “I consider I was
born when I built this building,” she said.
Ezra Stoller/Esto, Canadian Center For Architecture
The New York landmark, on Park Avenue at 52nd Street, in 1958, not long before its dedication.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
Phyllis Lambert persuaded her father to make his
Seagram Building a paragon of modern architecture in the 1950s.
Frank Scherschel/Getty Images
Mies van der Rohe, center, touring the Seagram
Building with its building committee in 1956. Phyllis Lambert, whose
father founded the Seagram’s empire, has written a new book about the
creation of this monument to modernism, in which she played a pivotal
role.
United Press International/Canadian Center For Architecture
Ms. Lambert with Philip Johnson, left, and Mies van der Rohe in 1955.
Designed by the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson,
the Seagram Building was an instant classic upon its 1959 dedication and
was once described by the critic Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the millennium’s most important building.”
Ms. Lambert’s book, “Building Seagram,”
being released next week by the Yale University Press, is something of a
joint biography: a history of this stately Park Avenue landmark that
many consider the pinnacle of postwar architecture in New York, rendered
through the lens of her vivid memories of its invention and of her
privileged early years as the daughter of the liquor baron Samuel
Bronfman, who founded the Seagram distilling empire. The book reveals
many new details about a building that remains among the most studied of
the modern era.
Though it now seems an implacable and timeless monument, a bronzed
monolith standing resolutely behind its well-proportioned plaza, the
tower’s existence was by no means ordained. In June 1953 Ms. Lambert was
a 26-year-old recently divorced sculptor living in Paris, a
self-imposed exile from her native Montreal and from her domineering
father.
It was then that she reeled off a missive to her father, a response to
his own letter outlining plans for a New York skyscraper. She was not
impressed with the undistinguished modern box his architects proposed
and let him know: “This letter starts with one word repeated very
emphatically,” she wrote, “NO NO NO NO NO.”
Seven more pages followed, in which Ms. Lambert alternately scolded,
cajoled and lectured her father on architectural history and civic
responsibility. There was “nothing whatsoever commendable” in the
proposed design, she wrote. “You must put up a building which expresses
the best of the society in which you live, and at the same time your
hopes for the betterment of this society.”
Sitting at a corner table in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons, the
Seagram Building restaurant that inspired the phrase “power lunch,” Ms.
Lambert, still unyielding at 86, laughed with unguarded pleasure at the
nerve she demonstrated 60 years ago. “When I read it now I think, ‘Wow,
it’s amazing,’ ” she said of her letter. “I was thinking the whole thing
through as I wrote.”
Her father was impressed enough by her passion to invite her back from
Paris, thinking she could, as she writes, “choose the marble for the
ground floor,” a task he thought would assuage her. But Ms. Lambert was
not content to play a subservient role. “When I come to the U.S. it will
be to do a job and not to sit around the St. Regis making sweet talk,”
she wrote to her mother, Saidye.
She got her chance and eventually won the title director of planning for
the project, along with a $20,000 salary. Determined to choose an
architect who would “make the greatest contribution to architecture,”
she recalled, she was referred to Philip Johnson, who was leaving his
post as director of the architecture department at the Museum of Modern
Art to devote himself fully to his fledgling architectural practice.
Together they made a shortlist of candidates. In one memorable afternoon
they sorted the contenders with Eero Saarinen in the living room of
Johnson’s Glass House, in New Canaan, Conn., now a landmark but then
still new. Saarinen later tossed himself into the mix, proposing a tower
similar to the one he would deliver to CBS for a site just a few blocks
away. He was rejected, as were Marcel Breuer, Pietro Belluschi, Walter
Gropius, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei and Minoru Yamasaki. One
prominent architect Ms. Lambert did not have to worry about was Frank
Lloyd Wright. He had already put himself forward for the job (among his
proposals was a 100-story tower) only to be dismissed by Seagram
executives as ungovernable.
That left two options: Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French modernist, and
Mies, who had moved to Chicago from Germany in 1938. Ms. Lambert chose
Mies, whose career Johnson had championed for decades. Mies, in turn,
made Johnson a partner, and put him in charge of much of the interior
work. “Mies forces you in,” Ms. Lambert wrote in October 1954. “You
might think this austere strength, this ugly beauty, is terribly severe.
It is, and yet all the more beauty in it.”
That severity represented an aesthetic about-face for the Seagram
company, then with headquarters in the flamboyant Art Deco Chrysler
Building. One of Ms. Lambert’s more amusing revelations in the book is
that Seagram’s offices there were designed by a young Morris Lapidus,
future maestro of Miami kitsch.
Mies and Johnson were in some respects unlikely architects for the
Jewish Bronfman family, in that both had checkered histories during the
1930s. While Mies had been apolitically opportunistic in Germany,
Johnson was a fascist and anti-Semite. The Bronfman family had its own
past to contend with. “The fortune was started or hugely advanced by the
sale of liquor into the United States during Prohibition,” said Daniel
Okrent, author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.”
Ms. Lambert is somewhat evasive on that subject, but she writes that the
“stigma” of that past was on the minds of Seagram executives, who were
concerned that they might have trouble finding renters for a building
owned and occupied by a liquor company.
But first they had to build it, a task that required all the backbone
Ms. Lambert revealed in her initial letter to her father. That meant, in
May 1955, staring down a conference room packed with some 30 builders,
all men, who questioned the feasibility of Mies’s plans. “I only had one
thing in mind, and that was making sure Mies built the building he
wanted to,” she said. “When you’re young, you’re very clear about what’s
right and what’s wrong.”
She was uncompromising in her defense of Mies’s vision, even after he
returned to Chicago when New York State authorities claimed that he
lacked the proper qualifications to practice architecture. When a
contractor tried to dissuade her from using an expensive brick bonding
technique because it would be hidden from view, she channeled the
aphoristic Mies, countering, “God would know.” (The building’s
structural integrity, in any case, was assured by its chief engineer,
Fred Severud, who was later an author of a cold-war primer on safety
titled “The Bomb, Survival, and You.”)
Carol Willis, the founding director of the Skyscraper Museum in New
York, said the Seagram Building gave “a modernist corporate identity to a
city that was changing from stone to glass.”
That transformation did not come cheaply. While Mies averred “Less is
more,” that was not a philosophy he applied to the budget. The highly
customized building cost about $36 million, an astronomical sum at the
time, and then incurred what was effectively a luxury tax from the
state, an imposition that became the subject of a protracted legal
fight. In a 1964 editorial, The Times described this “tax on
architectural excellence” as nothing less than a “catastrophe.”
There were other frustrations. In 1958 Ms. Lambert commissioned Mark
Rothko to create a series of murals for the Four Seasons. He began work
but backed out and then vented to a reporter that he had only accepted
the job with “malicious intent,” so he could make paintings so
disagreeable as to spoil the appetites of the restaurant’s fat-cat
patrons. (The episode became the subject of the Broadway play “Red.”)
Ms. Lambert puts little stock in Rothko’s rant. “He had this religious
feeling about his work,” she said, and simply didn’t want it hanging
where it would serve merely as decoration. “I kind of understood his
point.”
Other artists Ms. Lambert tried to enlist were Brancusi and Picasso.
Brancusi treated her to Champagne in his Paris studio, where he kept a
gong over his bed. Nothing came of the visit. She recruited Picasso to
create a suite of sculptures for the Four Seasons. She met him for lunch
at his studio in Cannes, and he charmed her by forming animal shapes
from pieces of bread. But the meeting came to nothing, a failure Ms.
Lambert, who had sharp features and bright eyes, attributed to the
jealousy of Picasso’s lover Jacqueline Roque. “That was what we all
assumed,” she said. “I was a very pretty young lady.”
She did get her Picasso, however. “Le Tricorne,” a stage curtain he
created in 1919 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, has been a Four Seasons
signature since the restaurant opened in 1959. Ms. Lambert purchased it
from an independent dealer for $50,000.
Even as ownership has passed from the Bronfman family’s control, Ms.
Lambert has watched over the building. A set of design standards
established in 1979 as part of a complex lease-back agreement stipulated
everything from the positioning of venetian blinds to the continued
“policy of genial permissiveness” regulating its landmark plaza. “It has
to be maintained properly, and that’s a lesson I hope people have
learned,” she said. The building became a New York City landmark in
1989.
Ms. Lambert later became an architect herself, studying under Mies at
the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1979 she founded the Canadian
Center for Architecture in Montreal, where she lives in a historic
building with two bouviers des Flandres. Her singular devotion to
architecture inspired a 2007 documentary, “Citizen Lambert: Joan of Architecture.”
“When she got the Seagram Building built, it was the first time you
really realized that architecture brought something to the city that
didn’t exist,” said the architect Ricardo Scofidio, a partner in the
firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, which redesigned the Brasserie, the
Seagram’s less rarefied restaurant, in 2000. “It really turned the city
around, and for architects it suddenly raised their status in the eyes
of clients.”
Musing on her accomplishments between bites of tuna tartare Ms. Lambert
betrayed a clear sense of satisfaction. “You come down the street and
you see this building and it’s just fantastic,” she said. “I was just so
passionate about what had to be done.”
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