Canadian Centre for Architecture

This guide to the Canadian Centre for Architecture starts with a nineteen fifty-four letter in which a young Phyllis Lambert refused her father's plans for the new Seagram headquarters in New York, and talked her way into hiring Mies van der Rohe instead. It follows her back to Montreal two decades later, buying a nineteenth-century railway-baron mansion built for Canadian Pacific railway men, to stop it from being demolished. That mansion, and the seam where it meets the newer building, is what she and architect Peter Rose spent the nineteen eighties working on.