The methods of Mies: curator Phyllis Lamber's fascination with master ar - chitect Mies van der Rohe has lasted a remarkable fifty years. Mies in America, an exhibit celebrating his work on this side of the Atlantic, makes it clear why By Sara J. Angel – Saturday Night June 16, 2001 AS EDGAR BRONFMAN WOULD LATER TELL IT, WERE IT NOT FOR HIS SISTER Phyllis's inspired intervention, the Seagram Building in New York would not have been a modernist masterpiece, but rather a run-of-the-mill office tower, about as noteworthy as the average in - surance-company building. Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of liquor baron Sam Bronfman, was then twenty-seven years old, a recent Vassar College graduate studying art in Paris. Aware of her father's plans to build a corporate headquarters, she asked to see the sketches, and when she did, wrote a letter entreating him to build something more distinguished. He asked her to come back to North America to help commission an architect. The day Lambert met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in 1954, she knew he was the one. Dressed in his daily uniform -- a dark, elegant suit -- he said very little, but his language, like everything he built, was assured, uncomplicated, and well-structured. She knew his history -- how, in an - ticipation of his career to come, he'd added his mother's maiden name, "van der Rohe," to his less-than-remarkable "Ludwig," and how he'd received his first major commission at nineteen, in 1905, a house so perfectly executed that Peter Behrens, Germany's most prestigious archi - tect, offered him a position in his office. Lambert was also familiar with the German Pavilion Mies had designed for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, a sleek single-level, flat- roofed building of glass, marble, onyx, and chrome. And she'd seen his glass-panelled apart - ment towers on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, whose architecture, like that of ancient Greek temples, depended on the repetition of a single form. "His work made such an impact," Lam - bert, now seventyfour, recalls. "And it's visceral, not abstract." She soon persuaded her father to give Mies the commission. Lambert is sitting at the head of the boardroom table at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Archi - tecture (CCA), the museum she founded in 1979. Dressed in a black suit, her hair cut short, her only accessory a rope of dark beads, she's telling the story of how Mies won her father over. "Mies was always very respectful of what the client wanted. He asked what my father would like for his building. My father answered, 'Bronze.' Then my father said, 'This building has got to be your crowning glory.' He didn't give any more instructions than that, other than to say, referring to the nearby Lever House, 'Just one thing, Mies. I don't want a building on stilts.'" Later, when the architect and the patron reviewed a model, Sam Bronfman said, "Mies, I thought I said I didn't want a building on stilts." Mies respectfully walked his client around the model and said, "Mr. Bronfman, come over here and see how beautiful it is." The Seagram Building's stark simplicity, its walls of polished marble and pink glass, and its well-defined open plaza space made a bold new statement. But executing Mies's vision proved difficult. Soon, Lambert began to witness discord between the architect and Seagram manage - ment -- "the worms coming out," as she puts it -- over the details of the construction. She de - vised a plan. "I got myself into the building company," she says, referring to her appointment as director of planning for the Seagram Building. "I had one thing I wanted to do -- and that was one thing: I wanted to see the building that Mies wanted to build built. People would say to him, 'I want to do this, and I want to do that.' I just kept them away. I didn't allow for any kind of ref - erenda." Lambert spent four years on the project. She made sure Mies was able to give his building all the details he thought necessary, an expensive luxury seldom afforded to architects. "Mies wanted a tinted glass," Lambert says. "We found a company that could make it, one that did glass for an automobile company. There was a huge assembly line and to do the Seagram Building took three days' production. There were lots of things about the building that were in - dustrial." The revolutionary design forever changed the urban landscape of North America, in - fluencing city planners and architects ever since. It also encapsulated Mies's credo: "Create form from the essence of the task, with the means of our time." This week, Mies in America opens at Manhattan's Whitney Museum. A co- production of the Whitney and the CCA, the exhibit features the architect's work and reveals his working meth - ods with drawings, photos, collages, and even books from his personal library. It will come to the CCA in Montreal in October. Discussions about producing a Mies exhibition began in 1996, on the anniversary of the archi - tect's hundredth birthday. Although many were interested in curating shows about him -- includ - ing the Museum of Modern Art's Terence Riley, who mounts Mies in Berlin next week -- Phyllis Lambert knew that when it came to presenting Mies in America, she was the one. Not only did Lambert work closely with Mies on the Seagram Building, she went on to study with him at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and to work in his practice in Chicago. For more than fifty years, she has remained his champion; the CCA, under her strewardship, has amassed one of the world's largest collections of Mies drawings, many of them unseen prior to the preparations for this exhibit. "I think there's a big difference between looking at the work of an architect when you're a scholar and you don't know how things happen in an office," she of - fers, "than when you're aware of the methodology of a practice.... When it came to the work of Mies," she adds, "I knew how to interpret it." LAMBERT EXPLAINS THAT THE exhibition will challenge the conventional take on Mies, which is that he arrived in his new country with his genius fully formed. When asked what might have become of him had he not come to North America, Lambert is succinct: "The Barcelona Pavilion was beautiful. And maybe he would have done some more beautiful things like that. But I think if he had not come to America, we would not have heard much about him." Mies van der Rohe moved to the United States from Germany in 1937, after it became appar - ent that the practice of modern architecture would be hopeless under Hitler. Mies's reputation, to that point, rested largely on the Barcelona Pavilion and a number of small-scale commis - sions, mostly domestic residences. He had designed the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia, a modernist jewel built in 1927 whose boxy single-storey street front and rear two-storey garden facade featured full- height windows, while the interior boasted chromium-cased steel columns and dividing walls of onyx and ebony. When the curator Philip Johnson saw the house in 1930, he linked the experi - ence to visiting the Pantheon, calling Mies "prophetic." In his 1932 New York exhibition Modern Architecture, which he co-curated with H. R. Hitchcock, Johnson showcased Mies alongside the recognized masters Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, and chose the Tugendhat House for the cover of the exhibition's catalogue, thus heralding Mies as the harbinger of a new movement. Despite these triumphs, many of Mies's most significant works of the inter-war period were plans done only on paper, featured in journals but never executed. Among them was his 1921 "Study for a Glass Skyscraper in Berlin," which foreshadowed the towers he would build in the U.S. But rather than harm his reputation, his lack of constructed works merely heightened his mystique. One of his contemporaries, Herman Peter Eckhert, wrote to a colleague, "I'd be in - terested to know ... who is this Mies van der Rohe? I have seen his works published, but there are wicked tongues who maintain that he has never actually built anything, and that his real name is Lehmann. But this is strictly in confidence!" Mies arrived in New York on the S. S. Berengaria, escorted by his clients Stanley and Helen Resor, who ran J. Walter Thompson, one of the world's largest advertising agencies. They trav - elled with Mies to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they had commissioned him to build a house. Within a year of his arrival, Mies became head of the architecture department at the Armour In - stitute of Technology in Chicago, which later became the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He also received the contract to design its new campus. "It was the crucible that defined his career," says Lambert, "a rare opportunity, perhaps only comparable to the challenge met by Thomas Jefferson in designing the University of Virginia." The campus was built gradually, starting in 1942, in the urban slums of Chicago's Near South Side, and took more than ten years to complete. The project was daunting, not only because of its immense scale, but because Mies had to build within an American city using domestic ma - terials and methods. Whereas in Europe an architect could make structural decisions once work on a building had begun, Lambert says that in the U.S., "it was necessary to draw and specify every detail for the bid process well in advance of construction." Mies collaborated with other architects in Chicago and they pushed him to consider a variety of structures, Lambert says: steel girder and steel columns, concrete slab and steel girder, con - crete slab and steel columns.