Review: Building Seagram, by Phyllis Lambert

“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...