Phyllis Lambert

EO

What makes for good architecture?

PL

It depends. Determining what good architecture is as a practice is an entirely different conversation than determining what good architecture is as a part of life or as a public concern. [Laughs.] I was just thinking about Vitruvius’s definition of architecture: “Firmitas, Utilitas et Venustas,” translated “firmness, utility, and beauty.” When I think about architecture now, endurance and the environment are central concerns. We shouldn’t build throwaway structures anymore, but we do. I also think about equity with respect to how a thing is used.

EO

Let’s talk about the Seagram Building. You and your family are Canadian, and yet you came to America and built one of the most celebrated buildings in recent architectural history. I’ve been thinking about how the people who have contributed the most to the landscape of America are, in fact, foreign.

PL

I have two related answers to that. First, I thought America and Canada were the same thing when I was in my adolescence. [Laughs.] My family lived in Montreal, but we spent the summer in New York. My father was constantly going back and forth. He’d be in Montreal on the weekends and in New York during the week. I didn’t see any real difference. At school, however, kids regarded the United States as an alien thing. Second, politicians seemed intent on inspiring a strong sense of nationality. That kind of politics is coming back with a bang, unfortunately. To return, quickly, to the question of firmitas: one of the real problems in North America—Canada, included, of course—is how the government taxes buildings and applies building codes and regulations. These policies favor the very rich and no one else. If you’re building a structure that you will later own yourself, it makes sense to put money into building with quality materials. If the person overseeing construction of a building won’t own it long-term, they’ll choose the cheapest materials because maintenance won’t be their concern.

EO

Where did your interest in architecture come from?

PL

I was always very conscious of the buildings I walked past on the way to school. I was a sculptor as a kid as well, so observation was always very key. When I went to college, I minored in art because I knew I’d always be interested in it. My father wanted to build a building in the United States, and the 75th anniversary of Seagram was coming up, which was a modest company when he first bought it to Canada. This was right after prohibition, so there  was a very strong anti-spirits sentiment in the United States. He wanted to do something about it by building in New York. It was also about building something for himself, his “monument,” but that didn’t interest me.

I was more interested in what you can do in the context of a city with buildings. I was living in Paris when I got a letter from him announcing his idea for a building to celebrate Seagram’s 75th anniversary. He didn’t choose the architect or lead the process himself at all. I looked at the plans and thought the architect’s approach was appalling, so I went to England to visit this great collection of books on architecture at the Royal Institute for British Architects and to speak with some of the great historians of the subject. I learned a lot, and then my dad asked me to come back to the States to pick out the marble for the ground floor. I said, “No, that’s not what I’m doing,” and eventually, my mother convinced him to have me come back and see what I could do in terms of intervening in the development of the building.

I understood that if you’re going to build a building, you have to make a statement. You have to do something that’s good for the city, the country, and architecture in general. Otherwise, why build? It wasn’t so much about what I liked and disliked, but rather what I thought was important in and for society. For the Seagram Building, real estate developers came forward to talk shop about which buildings were important, but they had no concern for architecture. They thought  of the building as a product.

EO

What did architecture mean to you at the time?

PL

It was something deeply affecting. Certain buildings are depressing. Others, the ones that stay with you and make you happy, are beautiful. Architecture affects our lives more than anything else.

EO

So you were interested in building with no concern for the business side of things.

PL

[Laughs.] Never, never, never. When I was younger, my mother renovated the house we lived in. I was always interested in its transformation. She had maroon-colored wallpaper installed in the stairwell and gold leaf on the ceiling. I was fascinated by it all, but I don’t think my siblings were. You know, everyone is different in a family. And especially in our family, boys were meant to become businessmen and women were meant to marry rich businessmen.

EO

What was the house like?

PL

In the early 1920s in Montreal, houses were very heavy-handed with dark wood and colors. By the time I went to college, my mother had changed everything. The dark wood was painted a lighter color, and the heavy furniture was exchanged for antique furniture.

EO

How did noticing that change in the environment affect your thinking?

PL

I don’t think it changed my thinking writ large, but it certainly compelled me to only look forward.

EO

I read that when you went around asking architects to work on the project, many of them attempted to distance themselves from Mies van der Rohe. What did that reveal to you?

PL

Yes, many of the architects talked in terms of Mies. “I would do it like this instead of the way Mies did it.” I knew it was important that I went directly to their offices to have meetings with them. That’s how I  could see how things actually were. I didn’t know what the terms were at that point, but I learned what they were very quickly. [Laughs.] I paid close attention to how their offices were organized, the drawings that they had on their tables, and the way that they presented their work to us. You could tell huge amounts by who they were solely on a visual basis. I did see some of the big firms and architects because the head of the building company encouraged me to do so. But, why did you ask?

EO

I’m curious to hear about how people positioned him as a cultural touchstone. At the time, you were twenty-seven years old, and Mies was seventy. I’m trying to understand the stakes of the project from your point of view.

PL

But what does that have to do with the price of eggs? [Laughs.] The other thing that I was going to say about the choice of the architect is that this was one of the greatest periods of architecture. Modernist architecture wasn’t about following up on the past or fighting with it. It was about working with an entirely different set of criteria.

EO

Did you realize you were in a moment of architectural renaissance?

PL

No, it wasn’t a period of Renaissance building. The Renaissance is a period of history that started in the 13th century. [Laughs.] You can’t mix the two up—my father did. But, no, of course I knew this. As I said, I went to England to understand what the stakes of architecture were at the time. You couldn’t just know about a little bit, you had to know that there was a big change happening within all of society.

EO

Was this a conversation you were having with friends?

PL

I was actively questioning what was happening. I had a very good friend, an art historian,  who was dead set against contemporary architecture. That didn’t affect me at all. When I looked around, I thought it made sense. I had a very visceral reaction to what was happening at the time. I was using my intellectual and emotional intelligence.

EO

Can you talk about your time at Yale? I saw that when Mies fled Germany he went to Chicago and then taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology. You left Connecticut and moved to Chicago around the same time.

PL

I finished the work I was doing on the Seagram Building in 1958. At the time, it became clear to me that I wanted to continue working in architecture, so I went to Yale. While working on the Seagram Building, I was constantly asked about Mies and what we would do if something happened to him because he was 72 years old. Mies asked Philip Johnson to join him on the Seagram Building project. I thought it was a great idea because Philip Johnson did the first book on Mies for his show at MoMA. Philip Johnson was one of the great visionaries of that period. He was a New Yorker, too. Mies and I were both outsiders.

EO

Outsiders?

PL

An outsider is someone who’s situated outside of the current. It could be because of the color of your skin, religion, hair, beliefs, and politics. Mies and I, we weren’t part of the clan, the groupthink. We didn’t  share the same mindset as everyone else.

EO

And that’s how you felt?

PL

I always felt like an  outsider, even in my own home. I was the only one who was in the arts. When they were talking about business at the table, I just shut my ears. I wasn’t interested. Also, because we were Jewish in Canada, we were dealing with antisemitism. It was ripe in New York, too. If you were Jewish, you couldn’t go into certain buildings. All of these things made me feel like an outsider.

EO

How did your family’s wealth inform this feeling?

PL

You can’t look at my family then as what it is now. In the 1950s, in Canada, and especially New York, they were important as business people, sure, but they generally weren’t respected.

EO

Let’s go back to education. You went to Yale and then left for IIT. How long were you in Chicago?

PL

I was there from 1969 to 1980.

EO

What was it like studying with Mies?

PL

Mies approach to architecture was deeply philosophical. He felt that designing a chair was just as important as designing a building. He would say, “I’m not designing a building. I’m writing a language.” The other major thing Mies always said was, “Architecture is what your time is.” He was always asking himself, “What is our time?” His conclusion was that it was economics and industry. For him, architecture is about making our time visible to others. What is our time right now?

EO

What do you think?

PL

I think that the ruling concerns are utilitas—that is, equity—and the environment. There’s a great interest in using materials differently. Much of that is because of environmental concerns and not wanting to use too much carbon. In terms of formal approaches, there are a couple of great contemporary architects who reference the 1920s—Mies, Le Corbusier, that style of expression—but with a much more socially and environmentally-oriented consciousness. Mies had no sense of environmental concerns at all. When he was building 860 Lake Shore Drive, there were questions regarding  his choice to use clear glass. With the next buildings, he used tinted glass that would take the sun’s rays and shoot them back out. He said, “Well, the future of that building’s existence is for the people who make glass and chemicals.” He didn’t think about the way you put the building together, how to do it. Of course, we think quite differently now.

EO

Let’s talk about the Canadian Centre of Architecture. How old were you when you did CCA? How did you decide on an architect?

PL

It was sometime during my early 50s. I didn’t decide that at all, actually. I was in Montreal and formed a partnership with Mies’s right-hand man, Gene Summers. He had just left Mies’s office. Most strong architects, when they’re working with a master architect, eventually have to leave the office to establish their own way of doing things or risk working in the language of the person you’re working with forever. Gene was a very talented architect and very efficient. He knew how to build really well. We formed a partnership and decided to move to Los Angeles. I wanted to be somewhere where there were universities and easy access airports.

EO

When were you in Los Angeles?

PL

I moved to L.A. in 1973 and moved back to Montreal full-time in 1979. When I moved to Montreal in 1979, I established the International Design Conference in Aspen. And the CCA, from 1970 to 1980. I had an apartment both in Chicago and in L.A. at that point. But I had done a building in Montreal in the ‘60s, the Sadie Bronfman Centre for the Arts, for my family, which is now known as the Segal Centre for Performing Arts. That is a very Miesian building. My one concern for Mies was that he built the building he wanted to build. I made sure that he did and kept all the other stuff away.

EO

I’m originally from Los Angeles. I’m curious about what was happening there at the time. What  appealed to you?

PL

Well, downtown, all the old buildings there were being taken down to make space for new hotels. It was a very active, forward-thinking  city. Gene and I thought it was just fine. He loved the nature. He always said he would be a landscaper if he weren’t an architect. I didn’t live there all the time. He did. I was back and forth, between Los Angeles, Chicago, and Montreal.

EO

Did you want to build there?

PL

No. In L.A., most of the buildings were part of an  urban renewal project. The whole of downtown was being destroyed. There was, however, a project for a new hotel to be built, so we entered our names in the competition. We ended up winning, but we wanted to do the whole thing—build it and run it. When we were asked by the banks, “Who’s going to run the hotel? What’s your experience?,” we said, “We will.” We had no experience, though, so we couldn’t get a loan. [Laughs.] Actually, the Biltmore, a huge hotel built in 1921, was for sale. Gene was interested in making old buildings into new buildings—in spirit, not just by exchanging the furniture. We bought the Biltmore for absolutely nothing. It was just at the beginning of the car being all over the place. It was a huge hotel, and it was slated for demolition. We had a wonderful time doing that project. Most of the design was done by Gene.

By then, I came to realize I didn’t  like the idea of selling myself. I’m very good at supporting other people in their work. Around the same time, Montreal was suffering, and a lot of historical buildings were being demolished. I didn’t want to see the neighborhoods I was familiar with destroyed, so I went back to Montreal. I learned about Montreal again. As a child, I didn’t know much. When I was building the Saidye Bronfman Centre, and friends of mine from New York and Chicago came to visit, I would show them these Graystone buildings. I realized how much I loved them when I went back to Montreal. They were a material synonymous with  the city, which has a huge history to it that I’m working on now. But anyway, I learned to see the city and became an urban guerilla fighting to stop the demolition of the old Dundries.

When I decided to come back to Canada to work, my surname didn’t register with people because it wasn’t my family’s. I had changed it when I got married and then divorced, so people didn’t know anything about me when I was doing this work in Montreal. I knew, though, that there was a backup for me here. I wasn’t in a  a foreign place, I had history there. There’s something about being from a place. Do you feel Los Angeles in your bones?

EO

I do. I was actually just talking about this because I recently rewatched Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Do you know it?

PL

No, I don’t. The only Lady Bird I know was the wife of President Johnson. [Laughs.]

EO

It’s about this girl who’s from Sacramento. She wants to move to New York after she graduates from her Catholic high school. There’s a scene towards the end of the film where she meets with a nun at her school to discuss the personal statement she wrote for her college application. The nun is like, “I read your letter. I can tell you love Sacramento. You really understand it.” Likewise, L.A. is in my bones and lives within me. I absolutely needed to leave it to better understand it and myself. There were these built-in aspects of life there that were very meditative that I never really considered, like driving. After living in New York for 10 years, I’ve realized how much I’ve actually missed those exercises of meditation and stillness.

PL

Definitely. I understood how to operate in Montreal. I didn’t want to see Montreal and Canada fall into this terrible situation that was happening in the United States where city centers were being totally razed. Montreal wasn’t like that, anyway. It was made up of neighborhoods and had retained so much of its past. People would ask me, “How can you do the Seagram Building and then go and preserve buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries?” But it’s the same thing, it’s architecture. It’s the city, the buildings that are along the street, and how they come together to create a certain environment. For example, with a modern skyscraper, you have a whole block, maybe 400 feet or 200 feet, and you have one opening in it. But if it’s from the 19th century or sometime earlier, you have a whole block with 10 openings in it. All the doors, and all the individual houses. It's that variety which is essential. I think of the great saying, “Variety is the spice of life.” But it’s also a basic concept of ecology.

EO

For the CCA, did you know that you were going to build a structure around it immediately?

PL

No. It was the usual kind of structure with two wings, and then the chapel in the middle, which is absolutely beautiful, with lots of gardens around it. There was an architect from Switzerland who was working with developers from Montreal who wanted to buy the site and take down everything except the chapel. [Laughs.] I wanted to stop the demolition, so I said, “Look, I’ll buy it.” The buildings had quite a bit of damage after all those years, but I didn’t want them to just disappear. I didn’t care one way or another about the building. It was sitting in a wonderful garden, green site, and it had some funny buildings around it. It was sort of derelict in the back, the only building on a block.  About five acres. I didn’t know what to do with it for a long time but because I bought the building, Quebec landmarked it.

EO

Why did you decide to make it an institution?

PL

At that point, I had already started thinking of an institution dedicated to architecture. I was thinking of putting it in Ottawa, though, because Heritage Canada was there. Then I thought, “No, there’s no life in Ottawa.” It’s an administrative city, the capital of the country.

EO

Like Washington D.C.?

PL

In spirit. Not physically, but yes. Not many people live there. Montreal had always been a fascinating city. Because Quebec City is also the administrative city of Quebec, Montreal was a commercial and industrial city. It  always had to fend for itself. It was a very creative place. But anyway, the fact is that life was there. Energy was there. I decided, “This is where I'm going to stay.” It was also at the time that Quebec was trying to secede from Canada. Most of the three-button suit Anglos left because they didn’t want to be in a French province and  went south to Toronto and west to Calgary. Montreal became quite poor. That saved Montreal in many ways, though. When a city is poor, nobody’s building, and so nobody’s demolishing buildings. [Laughs.]

Anyways, I still had this building on my hands. I didn’t know what to do with it. I also had this collection of Montreal building photographs that I had been forming with the photographer Richard Pare in New York. I had been collecting drawings since around the time I  was working on the Seagram Building, because I was very interested in what people built in other times, like in  the 15th or the 18th century. I wanted to see not only what people built, but how they built it, what the regulations were, and what the purpose of the building was.  I had all these collections of photographs and I knew that a kind of institution could be built around the collection, but I didn’t want it to be part of a gallery or a museum. I didn’t want to be part of a university either, because they’re so mired in bureaucracy.

At the same time, Peter Rose, a friend who studied at Yale around the same time as me, wanted to have a series of talks by architects. We did, and through them, we got to know many of the major architects working at the time. I started talking with Peter about the ideas I had for the CCA—we were looking for the same values, although he was a postmodernist. I actually started working on the building with Gene Summers, but I didn’t like what we were doing, so I decided to go ahead with Peter instead. I wanted somebody who was also invested in Montreal’s history.

I was also taking a course in city history at IIT, and I wanted to have a sense of what it was like on site. I said to Richard, “Let’s go photograph these buildings.”  That turned into a big project that I’m still working on. I learned that if you have some idea of history, you could tell a lot by just walking around. You start to follow the way the stone is cut, the architectural forms, how they relate to architectural history, and so forth. You start to notice distinctions between neighborhoods, who may have been responsible for putting a building there, why a building was there, etc. All of this was happening at the same time.

EO

What came after the CCA?

PL

I ran the CCA for 10 years. It’s turned into the most amazing place. I’m so proud of it. I was lucky to have found the right people. It’s a place that asks hugely important, fundamental questions. It looks at the gray areas.  It’s independent, which is hugely important and fundamental. We do all sorts of very interesting exhibitions. One, “Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture,” was on medical issues and how they are  reflected in architecture. We’re now doing a series of exhibitions on photography. We hadn’t paid attention to our photography collection for years because there were other issues that had to be dealt with. One of these was called “Photography and Architecture.” It helped create the idea that architectural photography is a special category in and of itself. It’s a brilliant, brilliant exhibition. These shows can happen because there are great architecture historians who love working with the CCA.  It’s a partnership. I just made another little book of photographs that I had taken since the 1950s called Observation Is a Constant That Underlies All Approaches. My publisher on that project, Lars Müller, was amazing.

EO

Are the photos taken on a camera? On iPhone?

PL

On everything. I started off with a single-lens reflex camera. And I now only use my iPhone. [Laughs.] At one point, I was known to go around with two single-lens cameras on my shoulder. I only did black and white for a while, but then I wanted to use colors so I could project images to talk to people about things. And so I would take both black and white and color photographs, but it got to be a little heavy... [Laughs.] I wanted a little camera I could just stick in my pocket, so then I started taking photographs with this amazing little instrument. This little telephone.

EO

Do you feel 96 years old?

PL

I don’t know what it feels like to be 96. Do you?

EO

I’m quietly manifesting. Well, how old do you feel?

PL

I have no idea. But I remember my mother saying that too. She would say, “I don’t feel old, but I know my days are up pretty soon.” But I can’t worry about that. I really have work to do. Right now, I’m finishing this book, How Does Your City Grow? It’s a huge research project. When you go below the surface, that’s when it gets interesting. All the chapters are more or less written, but they all have to be rewritten. I started late. I went to architecture school when I was 31, but didn’t finish until I was 36 years old, I think. That said, I started Seagram when I was 27.

EO

Actually, it’s funny, because Rem Koolhaas wrote and published Delirious New York when he was 33. And he didn’t start OMA until he was 35.

PL

Yes. He is of course an amazing architect.

EO

Do you feel like you started late?

PL

Well, it’s not that I feel I started late, I did start late. I went to school with people 10 or 15 years younger than me. But, on the age thing, I have quite a few friends whose parents were also my close friends, and I’ve always been friends with the kids, people much younger than me. Age was never something that I thought much about.