Archinect - News

The Seagram Building after the Four Seasons: maintaining a costly landmark

2016-07-19T14:09:00-04:00

Mr. Rosen would not mind getting a little credit for maintaining the 59-year-old building, a landmark inside and outside, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. With its rich materials and exquisite detailing, the building demands scrupulous attention. And money. RFR executives estimated that it cost about 20 percent more to maintain the seemingly spartan Seagram Building than it would a typical office tower of roughly the same size and age. Less is more.

Iconic furniture, art, tableware and even a sausage grinder: hundreds of lots from Philip Johnson's Four Seasons head to auction

2016-07-13T13:33:00-04:00

If you've got a few thousand dollars lying around and want to grab a piece of lunchroom history, now's your chance.

Perfectly summed up by Vanity Fair as “Absolute ground zero for power lunching”, Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's iconic Four Seasons restaurant will end its lease in Mies' Seagram building this summer. While the designation from the The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission protects the interior of the restaurant from any structural changes, the Four Seasons still has to unload an awful lot of bespoke furniture and tableware—everything from salt cellars to wine glasses to barstools and serving carts.

Over 800 pieces and sets from the Four Seasons kitchen and dining areas will be auctioned off on July 26 in New York. Rifling off just a few of the items and estimated values, there are: Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable flatware and serving carts ($1,000-1,500 for a set for 12, same estimate for 1 cart), Hans J. Wegner chairs ($2,000-3,000 for a set of t...

Modernist treasures from Philip Johnson's iconic Four Seasons Restaurant headed for auction

2016-06-15T15:48:00-04:00

Now that the iconic restaurant’s impending demise is only weeks away, its furniture, tableware, and custom-made Knoll furniture will be included in the 500 lots headed for auction next month on July 26. News had surfaced last summer when Seagram Building owner Aby Rosen did not renew the lease for the quintessential Midtown “power lunch” spot for the last decades of the 20th century since it opened in 1959.

Additional background on this news can be found here: Landmarked Four Seasons restaurant must not be changed, NYC landmarks commission rules

Phyllis Lambert recognized with 2016 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize

2016-04-06T14:48:00-04:00

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced architect Phyllis Lambert as the 2016 recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize [...]. Dubbed as the "Joan of Architecture", Lambert is widely recognized for founding the Canadian Centre for Architecture and her role as Director of Planning for the iconic Seagram Building (which she commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design), among her other initiatives that advocate for architecture's cultural value.

More of Phyllis Lambert in the Archinect news:

Landmarked Four Seasons restaurant must not be changed, NYC landmarks commission rules

2015-05-21T15:25:00-04:00

The interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, a vision of Modernist elegance with its French walnut paneling and white marble pool of bubbling water, should not be changed, New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission decided [...]. The decision was a setback to Aby J. Rosen, the owner of the Seagram Building, which is home to the restaurant. Mr. Rosen had proposed what he characterized as minor changes to the interior that was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in 1958.

Phyllis Lambert — part of the group of architects passionately opposing Rosen's revamp plans and personally interwoven with the history of the Seagram Building like no one else — penned this Op-Ed in the New York Times last week: Save New York's Four Seasons.

Phyllis Lambert steps down from Canadian Centre for Architecture

2013-12-05T14:01:00-05:00

Phyllis Lambert, 86, announced Wednesday she is retiring as chair of the board of trustees of the museum and research centre she founded in 1979. A tireless defender of Montreal’s built heritage, Lambert has taken an active role in every major urban planning debate in the city in the last four decades, from redeveloping the Old Port to protecting Mount Royal.

Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is stepping down as chairperson. She had also served as Director of the CCA until 1999. Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara will succeed her as chair of the world-renowned museum and research center.

Before becoming an architect in the 1960s, Lambert established herself as Director of Planning for the Seagram Building, where she was responsible for hiring Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the designer. She recently published a book, Building Seagram, chronicling the experience.

Fred Bernstein reviews "Phyllis Lambert’s Building Seagram"

2013-05-13T18:37:00-04:00

As Seagram’s director of planning, Lambert visited the site daily. “I had intended to go back to Paris, but I stayed in New York, convinced that if the one person who really cared about the building was not there, Mies would not build Seagram,” she says. With Lambert as his protector and Johnson as his assistant, Mies went on to create in 1958 the Seagram building, a landmark of 20th-century architecture.

The Story Behind the Seagram Building

2013-04-08T13:43:00-04:00

Reading this was for me an epiphany. I could see, almost in a flash, the unity of building and landscape developing throughout Mies’s building art, ultimately morphing into the podium that binds the Seagram tower to the urban landscape — plaza, platform, an oasis amid the chaos of New York. This led me to reevaluate the importance of surrounding context, in Mies’s architecture throughout his career and to understand in a new light some of his statements, drawings, and photomontages.

"What led Mies to create the union of skyscraper and plaza on Park Avenue, a binding together so profoundly important in his oeuvre?" On Places, in an excerpt from the new book Building Seagram, Phyllis Lambert recounts the evolution of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architectural philosophy, from his early years in Berlin to the postwar American projects; in particular she explores his deep concern for the interrelationship between architecture and landscape, which culminated in his design for the Seagram Building.