The Ardent ‘Joan of Architecture’

CHICAGO — She is reportedly one of the world’s richest women, but money is hardly the only thing that sets her apart.

She is still remembered for what she did at age 27, which was to persuade her father, Samuel Bronfman, president of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons Corp., to drop an architect that his company already had selected for its Manhattan headquarters. She picked Ludwig Mies van der Rohe instead. His bronze-covered Park Avenue Seagram Building turned out to be his signature building, an aesthetic triumph and a world landmark.

Now 75, still fiercely opinionated and formidably intelligent, Phyllis Lambert was here for the opening of “Mies in America,” the traveling exhibition that she curated and that will run at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art until May 26.

Lambert recently discussed everything from her selection of Mies to today’s architectural scene. She also looked back on her own career as a museum director, historic preservationist and champion of the avant-garde--activities that have earned her the sobriquet “Joan of Architecture.”

Question: You were living in Paris in 1954 when your father sent you a clipping from Newsweek, which said that the California architects Charles Luckman and William Pereira had been chosen to design the Seagram Building. What was your reaction?

Answer: I had met Mr. Luckman on the boat going over to Europe a couple of years earlier. And I said, “That’s a rotten apple.” The drawing [of the Seagram Building] was so absolutely vile.

Q: How did your father react to your protest?

A: He said: “You come over and choose the marble.”

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Q: I have a hunch you didn’t want to be the decorator.

A: No. Then my mother said to my father: “Well, dearie, why don’t we have her come over and see what she can do?”

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Q. Was Frank Lloyd Wright on your list?

A. I never even considered Wright. To me, he was completely a 19th century man--manifest destiny, that sort of stuff.

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Q. So the choice came down to Mies and the Swiss-born Le Corbusier. Why did you go with Mies?

A. All the younger architects were always talking in terms of Mies. I came here and I saw 860 and 880 Lake Shore Drive [Mies’ steel and glass apartment towers, finished in 1951]. It was this kind of shock. It was so wonderfully beautiful.

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Q: What struck you about the design?

A: The toughness of it and the gentleness of it at the same time. The toughness is the steel--the raw, exposed found objects. And [the gentleness is] the proportions, the way the two buildings sat on the travertine, the way it played as you moved around the building, and the proportions of the steel to the glass and the curtains behind.

You stand on that white podium at the bottom of the buildings. The wonderful black columns come down. You have a sense of structure about you. You’re quite calm, you’re quite serene. Yet you have all these cars whizzing by. You’re there, but you’re away from it. That’s very strong in all of Mies’ work.

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Q: After the Seagram Building was finished, you went to architecture school at Yale, then transferred to the Illinois Institute of Technology and got your master’s degree in architecture in 1963. You also worked in Mies’ office. What wisdom did you sop up from the master?

A: I had a desk in Mies’ office. When he came in, I just followed him around. You absorb so much of it the way you absorb language when you were a child.... For example, I remember discussing with him the space that you’d live in. I’d grown up in a vertical house [a townhouse in Montreal]. And so I thought that was great. He said, “No, no.”

Of course, I now can’t bear anything but this great, big horizontal open space.

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Q: You’ve been lauded for recognizing that Mies was the architectural giant of his era. Who, in your view, are the key architectural figures of today?

A: There’s Rem Koolhaas, and that is because he has this incredible ability to gather tons of information and to synthesize it to a point. There’s Peter Eisenman, who is always searching for a new way of making forms that are highly inventive.

There’s Frank Gehry. He’s learned to use the computer as means of constructing things you couldn’t do without it.

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Q: Why has it been so difficult for Chicago to sustain the architectural spark it had when Mies was here?

A: One of the problems with Mies’ teaching was that Mies always said, “I want to do an architecture everybody can do.” But you couldn’t [do it] because you didn’t have all that in your head--you hadn’t read all those thousands of books. You didn’t have that intimate inquiry into philosophy.

At IIT, there was no experimenting. You were taught to keep your paper clean and all those things, like respect for materials. But you weren’t allowed to make mistakes.

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Q: You’ve long been interested in pushing the boundaries of contemporary architecture, but you’ve also championed the cause of historic preservation. Why should the past be part of the future?

A: You can’t start from tabula rasa. If you start pulling a town apart, it’s a terrible thing to do.

What Mies was doing [by delicately inserting his buildings into cities] was a much more gentle and a much more interesting thing than what Le Corbusier was doing [by advocating the demolition and rebuilding of swaths of cities].

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Q: But so many people can’t stand Mies’ work. They think his buildings are cold, aloof, especially compared with Wright’s.

A: What about the people who live in lofts? That’s more Miesian because of the exposed structure and free-flowing spaces. It’s not Wrightian.

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Q: Wright was famously unconcerned with problems like leaking roofs. How did Mies deal with everyday problems in projects like the 1951 Farnsworth House, his single-story steel and glass masterpiece in Plano?

A: Mies was very pragmatic. But he was wonderfully naive. The travertine [for the porch and floor of the Farnsworth House]--he said it’s a wonderful material. But he’d never tested it in this climate. And there’s mud; you take it in.

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Q: You’ve devoted your life to architecture, especially by directing the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the museum and study center you established in 1979. Did you make the right choice?

A: I remember Mies saying once, “There are so many ways to be an architect.” It’s always been an adventure. Just working on the Mies exhibition has been an adventure. Doing social housing in Montreal has been an adventure. It’s all part of architecture.

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Blair Kamin is architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.