“My father had a piece of land on Park Avenue, and he was intent on building a building there.” The father, in this case, was Samuel Bronfman, paterfamilias of the Seagram whisky dynasty. It is Phyllis Lambert (née Bronfman) speaking, in London, where she has recently lectured at the RIBA on her own creation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
The conversation may ostensibly be about architecture and her decisive role in directing its course during the latter twentieth century, but it is the relationship between Phyllis and her father that forms the insistent subtext. Perhaps, if things had been different between them, the world would never have got the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s crowning glory and a lasting monument to both public (that is, commercial) success and private . . . well, failure of communication.
Talking to Phyllis Lambert is a reminder that the story of modern architecture (and that of most other eras) is on the one hand a catalogue of great men and great buildings, and on the other, an expression of complex and highly specific personal motivations, not all of which necessarily reach the light of day. She would, rightly, object that architecture is also a catalogue of great women, though there are fewer of them in the authorised version. Phyllis Lambert will have earned herself a place in it, doubly, for having insisted that her father hire no less an architect than Mies van der Rohe for his Manhattan flagship, and now for having set up an institution dedicated to the exhibition and study of architecture that already ranks as the third most significant archive of architectural texts and images in the world (following the RIBA and the Avery Library at Columbia University).
“l guess my three-minute life story starts off with the fact that my father wanted a boy when I was born.” Phyllis, the second daughter, was followed by two sons, Edgar and Charles, who were “slated for the family firm” and duly took it over. What was her involvement with the Seagram business? “Zero.” It’s one of those clipped responses that reveals as much as it conceals.
As a young girl, Phyllis realised that she was unwilling to conform to her family’s expectations: “I was meant to marry, a rich man, a man of substance, and have a nice family and do good works. I hated it. Hated it all. Being Lady Bountiful’s not me.” But in fact, marriage—albeit short-lived—proved an effective means of escape. A graduate of Vassar, the all-women’s college where she had majored in American Culture, Phyllis married the Frenchman Jean Lambert in 1949 aged twenty-two. “I just found the whole thing appalling,” she says of her three years as a society hostess based in New York and Paris. She wanted only to go to Paris to paint and sculpt (a passion since childhood) but “my parents wouldn’t hear of it.” When the marriage broke up, her father’s rebuke was severe. “He said, ‘You’re not just divorcing your husband; you’re divorcing the whole family.’ I said, ‘That’s quite right.’ But I was a married woman, and no one could tell me what to do anymore.”
The following few years in Europe were a period of great emancipation. But the arrival of a letter from her father containing a clipping from Time magazine about the plot he was proposing to build on in Park Avenue changed all that. Suddenly her energies were focused.
“I wrote my father a massive letter. The basic message was that when a person makes a decision to build a building, they are making a decision that affects everyone in the city, not just the people who work in that building. You have a great responsibility, and if you don’t want that responsibility you should go into somebody else’s building and just rent it.”
Her father, no doubt impressed by her zeal, but also— as she sees it—sensing a way of luring her back to North America, gave her the task of selecting the architect. She asked for six weeks to choose, consulted Lewis Mumford and Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art, and rapidly came down to two serious contenders: Mies and Le Corbusier. How did she make her decision? “I couldn’t see a Le Corbusier building on Park Avenue. He was much too personal. But when I went to Chicago and saw Mies’s Lake Shore Drive apartments—black,” she stresses with relish, “ugly, powerful, and clear, I just thought they were marvellous!”
Phyllis Lambert herself later qualified as an architect, setting up a practice in Toronto—“l didn’t go back to Montreal till my father died,” she adds pointedly. She declined to have anything to do with the family’s development firm, Cadillac Fairview, beyond an advisory role on a few projects, ensuring, for example, that Mies was the architect for the Toronto Dominion Center. Becoming disillusioned with her own attempts to design periphery shopping centres, she moved to Montreal and began photographing greystone buildings there. It was the beginning of a passionate involvement with her native city, spanning from the championing of a six-block area called Milton Park against redevelopment to her founding of the CCA in 1979. It is hard not to see these activities—especially the latter—as the Return of the Prodigal Son. Or, in this case, Daughter.
Phyllis Lambert describes herself as “mostly interested in the city, and how buildings relate to the city. I’m concerned with how you make whole sections of the city work, not with how to invent a new skin or a new form. What matters is whether a building works well in its environment—whether it cuts corners or reinforces the street line, how it relates to the buildings beside it, what kind and height of entry it has, where the cornice line and floor lines are.”
She sees her role since the 1970s as having been a kind of urban conscience, drawing attention to the calamitous consequences of overdevelopment. “The basic problem is that by raising land values, you start making land so expensive that small shops and low-income housing are squeezed out. You start a cycle of deterioration, and you lose the diversity of use in the city.” Is that something architects can have any bearing on? “No, they’re too busy. If you’re an architect, the thing you want to do is build. There have to be people outside the process of trying to get commissions, able to affect much larger areas.”
This is part of the CCA’s broader mission: to make evident the influences at work in the city on intellectual, social, and cultural levels. She takes obvious pleasure in developing the CCA’s collection, selecting documents that help to trace the genealogy of ideas. She refers to the plan for Milton Park as “Corbusier mixed with Clarence Stein: you have a pedestrian roadway next to a vehicular roadway. I find Corbusier’s Voisin Plan one of the most horrific documents: those huge towers and the street given away to motor vehicles . . .” Her voice rises to a pitch of indignation, tempered by the collector’s rationality: “I love following these perversions of an idea . . . these undigested theoretical thoughts. It’s the same as what’s happening with Prince Charles.”
“One is not operating under the same conditions as in the 1920s and 1930s, when it was assumed you were going to start all over again. The people I admire are people dealing with the fabric of the city. Léon Krier is certainly very interesting because of his absolute volte-face. John Hejduk is raising fascinating issues and narratives.” Rem Koolhaas surfaces more than once in the conversation.
Phyllis Lambert’s concern for active street life, for congenial public spaces, for new buildings that enter a neighbourhood and re-establish its strengths, sounds laudable. Against this fervour, however, is set a picture of a rather solitary, younger Phyllis, the one “dreaming of my future and pretending I had no siblings,” looking forward impatiently to “getting out from under my family”—perhaps the tightest-knit community she could ever have been a part of.
It is telling that for her undergraduate thesis she wrote on Henry James, and why he went abroad. “I guess what interested me was the problem of an American in exile, relating to his or her own culture. That fascinated me because I was an exile in the United States and was deeply attracted to European culture myself.”
And what were her conclusions? “The major conclusion was James’s deep need for tradition, for the physical touching of stones, for being able to say: ‘When I touch Oxford, I feel the hundreds of years of tradition behind them.’ He needed that contrast of the innocent American and the complexity of older cultures, of the European society which he adored.”