Lee Mindel: Speaking From Experience

TRANSCRIPT

Lee Mindel: I don’t rest on any laurels of the past. I don’t know, you have to keep, be present and reinvent yourself. And as time changes and technology changes, you have to change with it, despite the principles that you may carry forward.

So applying the same principles of discipline and rigor, but using the new technologies and new advances in ways of thinking.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel. All the elements of a well-lived life.

When you spend enough time in the New York design scene as I have, you find some rare folks who have amassed stories, lots of stories, and with a CV to match. My guest today is one of those incredible people who seems to have done it all. A gentleman who has traversed so many areas of design at the highest level.

Architecture, interiors, furniture design, journalism, and now the collectible market, Lee Mindel. He’s best known as the principal of SheltonMindel, an architecture firm founded by Lee in the late ’70s with his collaborator, the late Peter Shelton. Over the years of his practice, the firm has become known for its masterful use of light and a kind of classic modernism that’s hard to find in 2025.

Both Lee and his firm have won numerous awards and has designed generally proportioned homes for the elite of the elite in places like New York, London, Palm Beach, and the Hamptons. He’s also done a sailboat, private jets, headquarters for Ralph Lauren, more on that later, and even some work for director Brian De Palma. He’s also designed furniture, including a 2022 all-white collection of plaster glass lights for a gallery Ralph Pucci called “Veritas.”

And on that journalism side I mentioned, Lee has been a frequent contributor to many publications, including Architectural Digest, where he had a column. His latest triumph is a design gallery that opened in 2022 in one of the most iconic contemporary buildings in New York, 56 Leonard by architects Herzog & de Meuron. It’s called Galerie56, and it’s become a force for narrative-rich exhibitions in its tiny little jewel box of a space.

All that, and Lee’s just a nice guy you want on your side and at your dinner table. His passion and interest for design are really evident in just about everything he does, and it shows. I caught up with Lee from his home in New York to discuss growing up in New Jersey with a socially active family, his life studying at Harvard, navigating the murky nightclub scene of Manhattan in its heyday, his own impressive collection of design, and much more.

Even though we’ve crossed paths in New York in the design scene for years, I kind of know a little about your early life. And I read that you grew up in a political family of sorts that hosted people like Eleanor Roosevelt in your home in New Jersey. Can you tell me a little bit about your early life there?

I was from a very suburban town, which at the time I thought was not of note, and now I think is still not of note, except for the Highland Park, New Jersey, with the exception of the alumni of that town that came out of it that were very interesting, I learned in retrospect. But we were part of the baby boomers. At the time, there was this interest in the establishment of the state of Israel, which had just been established, I think, in 48, but this was 10 years later.

And there was a call around the world to plant the Negev, the desert. And so there was, each of these small towns had what was called an Israel Bond Drive. So instead of getting presents, we got trees for our birthdays and whatever, bar mitzvahs, whatever it was.

So my dad became the chairman of the Israel Bond Drive for Highland Park, New Jersey, and I guess the vicinity, I think for about three years. And so the first year that he did it, I think I was five, the house guest was Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor Roosevelt was kind of idealized at some point after the war of what she represented.

And she also was quite independent. And so she came to our house and she visited us. And I remember going to the event in a motorcade with the police in front of us. And my mother leaned to Mrs. Roosevelt and said, Mrs. Roosevelt, this is the first time I’ve had the cops in front of me. And she chuckled. And I just remember it was historic. And then we had Jimmy Roosevelt one year and then Bess Myerson was the guest one year. And Hubert Humphrey was a guest another year. So my family was not really political per se, but they were interested in contributing towards the establishment of this part of the world.

And what I realized at an early age was that this part of the world was a desert with no greenery. And as Americans, we were helping change that into an agricultural state. So I had a consciousness of that from age five on, which was poignant in a way, but little did I realize that I would be going to a boarding school at 12 that was not so friendly to Jewish people. As a matter of fact, it was a bit confusing at that point, actually. 

What did your parents do? 

My father was in real estate. He was also a dentist and an orthodontist. And he actually borrowed money to go to the Harvard Medical School after the Depression because there was a quota. And he went there.

And then he was very interested in real estate simultaneously. So he navigated both of those things and had kind of dual professions.

Oh, okay, wow, all right. And so you went off to boarding school and probably experienced a little bit of, I don’t know, maybe not culture shock, but just sort of outright anti-Semitism in your school. If I could go back in time and visit you at the age of 17, 18, what were you like?

I always was working. I had, I remember even, you know, from age 13 or 14, I was doing all kinds of jobs. I worked in a steel factory when I was 15 or 16.

Then I worked cleaning department store dressing rooms when I was that age. And then went off to the University of Pennsylvania after boarding school. And why there?

Well, I applied to a bunch of Ivy League schools. It wasn’t that far from home. And, but I didn’t wanna be so close to home.

Princeton was very close to where I lived. And then I went to Harvard Graduate School of Design at that point. But back to that 12-year-old, which formed a lot of the things I faced, I actually experienced swastikas that were spray painted in my textbooks.

And I was very confused by that because I didn’t know that any kind of prejudice existed anywhere as a child. And at 12 years old, I didn’t tell anybody. It frightened me actually.

And at the same time, I was getting tutored to be bar mitzvahed at this place. I wasn’t the only Jewish person there, but in any case, it was a very confusing time. And so I was both struggling with my identity while pursuing my identity vis-a-vis the bar mitzvah and so forth.

So it was, I was being tutored for this thing while I was simultaneously going to what was called convocation three times a week in the old English boarding school schedule where you would break for a kind of service at 10:30 in the morning three times a week, even though it was a seemingly non-denominational, it was predominantly denominational. So that was confusing. So I tucked that all in and it made me feel different and a little bit alone and work harder and try to be more and be better because I felt some shame or something about that given the kind of conflict that was going on.

And I kept that plus I had, I don’t know if this is the appropriate venue to talk about this, but I also had some sexual abuse at 12 too. And so that in tandem with this thing propelled me to want to do better and overcompensate for those things that make me feel so vulnerable. And so I developed this drive and a kind of ambition to overcompensate for how I was feeling inside.

So I knew I had to strive to, on the outside, appear to be better by achieving more, but on the inside feeling very vulnerable at the same time.

And were your parents sort of native-born Americans or were they sort of immigrants?

No, they were born Americans. But also they were of a generation, they got married very late because my dad never discussed his past. He, as I later learned, grew up in a cold water flat in Brooklyn.

My mother grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her father worked in a cigar factory and my dad was determined to get to Harvard. My mother went to Pace.

She ran a law firm with a paralegal degree and was a professional. And my dad decided he would not get married or bring kids into this world if he was bringing them into the world in which he grew up in, that he wanted to provide for his kids exposure and education to the things that he never had. And in that quest, he certainly did that in a magnificent way.

Yeah, I asked because obviously if you were sort of dealing with the confusion of both being bar mitzvahed while also being in a school for non-Jewish kids while also experiencing anti-Semitism, that generation, most of the parents were Holocaust survivors or they escaped or had family who did or.

Yeah, I think that was on everybody’s mind but I never discussed any of these situations till I was about 18 years old or 17, yeah. I just didn’t feel comfortable talking about it and I felt probably that maybe there was something wrong with me, that these things were happening to me. So I kind of just built a shell around myself and just moved forward and just worked really hard.

And, but I did feel a longing for something because I wasn’t able to express myself. And so I think creative outlets became for me an avenue as leading up to 17 or 18 to find creative expression because I felt so much inside me and I was always creative, that was my outlet. You know, whatever endeavor I was interested in through humor, through creativity, I was able to find some sort of satisfaction and identity.

So it’s not surprising that I would seek a creative path because that was where I was basically parking my anxieties and seeking relief.

And did you study design in undergrad or? 

No. 

Okay.So what did you study?

I was pre-med initially.

Oh, okay, because you’re a dad, maybe.

Yeah, and I just thought to be right, you had to be something and I didn’t wanna disappoint anybody. So I started in that and it was, I was not good at it. I was struggling with it and I just didn’t feel comfortable.

And then I was lucky to realize that at that time at University of Pennsylvania, there were people like Robert Venturi and Louis Kahn and Jack Thrower and people from the Bauhaus, the first generation of Albers disciples were there. And so as a senior and a junior, I started in this, they were only accepting a few people in this course, which was kind of a Bauhaus course. And I never thought I had the aptitude to be accepted in it.

And then I got accepted into it and it was a woman named Sasha Nowitzki, who was a, she was the Polish widow of Maciej Nowitzki, who did the first sculptural reinforced concrete structure in North Carolina. He was killed in a plane crash. So she came to teach at Penn and she had this course about form.

And so I was easing out of the pre-med and into this course on form. But I have to say, I felt a little guilty because I thought this is such an expensive place to be and I’m playing with clay and balsa wood and sticks and coloring out of paper. And I thought it was infantile that I was juxtaposing biochemistry and then with this sticks and form classes.

And then I also got into this life drawing, Alvar’s color theory, and started taking the great history courses in art and architecture. I had McCoubrey and Ackerman, these great people. And there was Louis Kahn lecturing. And I actually had Anne Tyng, who was one of Louis Kahn’s three women. If you’re familiar, he was married and had two mistresses. She was one of my teachers. And I didn’t realize what was happening around me that as I was moving into this area, how special a time it was. And the people that I was exposed to would forever be etched in my head as seminal historic figures who would, now that I look back in the rear view mirror, really help me think the way I think and pave the way I like to see and learn. So that being said, having that course in a graduate school as an undergraduate afforded me the ability to skip a grade and move into graduate school, getting credit for the first year, which now I was compensating for what I thought was sticks and bones and that kind of thing. So I applied to all the great schools and luckily I was surprisingly accepted because I really didn’t feel adequate at that point. 

To Harvard, to the GSD, right? 

Yeah, and Yale and other places. And it’s not like I had this burning passion to be an architect since I was five. I was always playing around with form, cutting out things, making little things, making tents in the backyard, doing things like that. But I didn’t imagine I would end up in this place, which is by default out of medicine and into a creative thing.

So when I did get to GSD, I really felt as though I was behind everybody. My class was very impressive and I didn’t feel as skilled at that point as the people in my class because they had wanted to do this since they were young. But the exposure there was astounding actually.

And I think about, and my parents also, I had gone to school in Europe, in Switzerland, and in France and in Spain on different programs and had a very interesting thirst for knowledge, art, history, and travel. And at Penn actually I got this job being a TWA youth representative for Ivy League youth. I didn’t expect to get that.

And so I traveled around the world for TWA selling these $5 youth cards, which would get people these discounts. And I was trained actually in Kansas City, which is where the TWA base was, and worked out of the Saarinen Terminal in New York, the original one.

Oh, okay, oh wow, okay. For kids that don’t know, TWA was a airline.

Yeah, Trans World Airlines, but Eero Saarinen built that wonderful building and I didn’t realize the profound effect that that would have on me too as an 18 year old. Now when I look back and I see the things that I care about and the history that I respect, it is because of that exposure that I had. So going into Harvard, I had the most, at the time, you don’t realize at the time how impactful these things are going to be or can be if you let them be.

So I had professors like Charles Correa, who was the leading architect in India, and we worked on the new plan for Mumbai. I almost moved to Mumbai with Reed Morrison to work on that, but decided not to. And then Richard Meier was there, and then I had Joseph Zaleski, who was head of the CERT office, and they were doing, one of our projects was the competition for Roosevelt Island, which was a competition that CERT won actually.

And then I had McKinnell, Kallmann of Kallmann McKinnell & Wood, who built Boston City Hall. And then I had a professor, Jerzy Soltan, who was Corbusier’s assistant. And then we were able to also take courses at Carpenter Center, which was the only Corbusier building in America, and the history courses with Ackerman, who did Renaissance and Secessionism. And these were the kind of courses that professors would get standing ovations in. So I was immersed myself in lessons that history, both architectural and political history, sociopolitical history, taught me about responses to creativity and architecture, which led me always to be a perpetual student. And to this day, I feel I am a perpetual student.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

And, you know, after you graduate, it was a few years before you kind of started your own firm. Did you have any other, do you have any sort of professional life before you went out on your own?

Yes, I went right into Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and there was an oil crisis then, and there was a lot of work in the Middle East, and everything stopped, and I was there like eight months, and 60 people got let go. Oh, wow, okay.

Is that what pushed you to start your own firm?

No, then I went to, I was at Edward Durell Stone for a short stint as well, and Peter Shelton was there. Now, when I went to undergraduate school, there was this gentleman named Peter Shelton who was in one of my classes, and he would ace the class and never show up, and he was 10 years older than me. He had had a career in cabinet making and movie making.

He was really a genius person, and I didn’t know at the time that undergraduate experience would turn into something, and I ended up sitting next to him at Edward Durell Stone. So, I didn’t realize that as you deconstruct your past, you kind of see the links of things and how you move forward when you look backward, and actually, until this interview we’re doing, I haven’t really thought about this before. So, I’m winging my Ancestry.com, not 23andMe, because they’re going under next week, but my architectural and educational Ancestry.com.

So, you met Peter at this job, and then how did that turn into?

Well, it’s even a funnier coincidence. I had a girlfriend at the time who also went to Penn, and when I was looking at her family photos, I saw Peter in her family photos I had been going out with her for a year or two, and I said, what is Peter Shelton doing in your family photos? And she said, he’s my first cousin.

So, I was kind of connected to him through that, and then when I was at Skidmore, I was on an escalator in Bloomingdale’s with Judy, and Peter was going down the escalator. I was going up the escalator, and he was with his girlfriend, and then we both saw each other, and then decided, then I went to Stone, but then shortly thereafter, we decided maybe we could do something together. But in between, I had another job.

I worked for Rogers Butler & Burgun, which was a hospital firm. They had done Weill Cornell, and they brought a group of us in, including Reed Morrison, who I went to Harvard with, who was my dearest friend, to build Staten Island Hospital on an accelerated pace. So, I worked at that hospital firm for a while, too.

And when you did sort of eventually team up with Peter, can you tell me a little bit about maybe what was your first commission? Like, what was that sort of first big break?

Well, they’re all big. The first commission was a bathroom. 

Oh, okay. And what was the bathroom like? 

Well, it was for Vera Rechulski, who was marrying Julio Santo Domingo, and it was one of the penthouses of 1 5th Avenue. So, although it started out as a bathroom job, we realized that there were no buildings in New York that had a landmarks plan for renovations and additions.

So, we got embroiled into a very heated situation with the improvements that various people were trying to do in landmarks buildings that were out of control. And this 1 5th Avenue became the test case at the Landmarks Commission. So, it went from a bathroom to becoming the first master plan for what was considered a landmark building in New York.

So, that took over a year to do. We had to do full-scale drawings, counting every brick. The drawings were almost seven feet high.

We had to identify every window, every sill, and do an inventory and create setback lines and rules and regulations that landmarks could use as a role model for other landmark buildings vis-a-vis air conditioning additions, greenhouses, all those things. And then once that happened and the bathroom was moving forward, there was what was called a greenhouse rule in New York was adapted then, which you could add 1% of a building square footage in what was deemed a temporary structure, a removable structure like a greenhouse. So, we ended up doing a greenhouse there and the bathroom and the greenhouse. One made it into The New York Times’ “Thursday “Home” section with Susie Slesin, that was our first publication.

And then she was writing a book called High Tech at the time.

Yeah, a very influential book.

And she was a very influential person. My hat’s off to Susie, she identified so many, she and Joan Kron identified so many things at the moment that are now not given enough credit for really seizing and naming something. You know, Philip Johnson named the International Style, Susie and Joan named High Tech.

Then the greenhouse happened, that made it into The New York Times Magazine. And then we got a commission to do a subsequent greenhouse on the other side of the building for a film director, Brian De Palma, who was doing Dressed to Kill at the time. So, this bathroom turned into two greenhouses and a landmarks commission.

What was Brian De Palma like as the client? 

He was nice, he was mysterious. 

That tracks.

You know, and it was Nancy Allen, and it was intimidating. You know, here was this movie director and this movie star and these jet setters and, you know, Peter and I shared a desk in an atelier on 59th Street, which now is a somewhat established building, but Planned Parenthood was in the, thrift store was in the ground floor, and we were an atelier of like 15 architects. And on the floor below us was Scott Bromley and Robin Jacobson and Fern Mallis and Gretchen Bellinger.

Scott was doing Studio 54, Fern was establishing her PR business, which led to CFDA and the tents and everything. Jane Hertzmark Hudis was her assistant, who now is the vice president of Lauder, and Gretchen Bellinger was a textile person.

So, that building was filled with interesting people that would go on to do interesting things. As you look back in the past, we were all there together, rummaging through Planned Parenthood.

What was that year about?

It was a different century. I don’t wanna go back that far, but it was late ’70s, very late ’70s. And then in this shared atelier there, there was a gentleman named Henry Garson, who was maybe 80 at the time.

He was the leading expediter in the city. And someone came to him, this is on the heels of Studio 54, which I was lucky enough to go to. Someone came to him and said, we have a project in Times Square.

We’re gonna do the largest discotheque in the world, and it’s gonna be called Bond International Casino. So, they said, we’re looking for somebody to help us with this, Henry. So, Henry was a lovely, lovely man, was several desks away from us.

And they knew Henry could get things through the building department that nobody else could get through. So, Henry turned to us and said, do you wanna basically try to see if this might work for you? So, Peter and I went on our bicycles with our knapsacks to Bond International Casino, which was a department store in Times Square.

And this was the department store that had the guy smoking the Winslow the Camel cigarette, smoke coming out of the billboard. And we got the job, and it was a Donald Deskey interior who had done the Rockefeller Center.

And the challenge was to retain those elements that Donald Deskey did, but completely transform the arena into something because the Donald Deskey stair was so iconic. And this was gonna be the venue that The Clash made their debut in America. And so, we were really young, and then we got a review in The New York Times about what an excellent job we did with our photograph and everything. But at that time, we didn’t realize that there was a lot going on that we weren’t aware of, vis-a-vis the mob, nightlife in New York, drug abuse. So often, there would be these meetings at 11 o’clock at night, and people would leave the room tired, and then they’d come in the room all entertained, and they’re going, we didn’t realize what was going on. And then there was a lighting designer named Frank Bisdale who was best friends with Divine.

So Divine was on site a bit, and the irony was the gentleman that we did One Fifth Avenue for, the master plan, the developer, owned the building that Divine had an apartment in on 59th Street. So we got to experience that a little bit, but we weren’t aware of the conflict of unions and not unions. We were just kids putting on a really preppy, cheery face for the dark side of New York and doing a really nice job.

We even got Liberace’s Dancing Waters from Las Vegas came in, and there were all kinds of interesting things from Vegas that came in. But there was a time we were there when I didn’t understand this union, non-union thing, but it was a non-union electrical job, and in came some people with some guns, and they blew open all the fuse boxes because it was not union built. So that was pretty startling.

But Bond’s was the largest nightclub in the world. It was 45,000 square feet, and then everything started to collapse on New York nightlife. We did work on the Palladium a little bit. Isozaki was over there, because the same group of people were doing New York, New York, Le Jardin. They were doing part of 54 ownership, Maurice Brahms, John Addison, and all of them ended up either in jail or because there was a lot of cash going, even Ian Schrager, Steve Rubell. So that was our experience in New York nightlife, which was pretty interesting and naive, but then again, is part of New York’s history.

And how did that kind of start to lead to corporate headquarters and palatial residential living?

Well, then we started getting some kitchens.

Okay, so we go from bathrooms to nightclubs to kitchens.

Bathrooms to kitchens, yeah, and back and forth. But then we did get a few residences back then to start to do. And we did get some acknowledgement.

Ironically, we got very nice acknowledgement from Abitare, Domus, Italian Bazaar, and The World of Interiors. And then that gave us some notoriety, I guess, but we were still struggling, always struggling, in this profession.

And then we were finishing up a residence at 5th and 5th Avenue. I ran into Ralph Lauren there and I asked him if he would like to see this residence. I knew Donghia had done his residence and there was a part of him that was as much interested in an Americanized version of modernism as there was an Americanized vision of tradition, which made him very interesting.

So he was very interested in the space and sent his staff over to see it, his wife. And I said to him, well, maybe someday our paths will cross. And I never thought twice about that.

And then independently, about four years later, also, I had another strange parallel relationship. One of the many jobs I had in school, I was a cater waiter, I did graphics for the Graduate School of Design. I worked in the MIT planning office and I went for this call to be the spokesperson or the model for a company called Bert Pulitzer.

Bert Pulitzer was a competitor of Ralph Lauren. I didn’t even know Ralph Lauren then. And I got that job. It was a firm called Hill Holliday Cosmopulos in Boston. I didn’t realize that you had to pitch a job to get a job with these advertising agencies. So I didn’t realize I was being pitched as this person.

And so interested in being creative, I thought my job was to write the storyboard, find the location, get the accessories. And the last thing you did was be in the picture. So I created the scene on Walden Pond and the poetry of Thoreau. And I didn’t realize that this was the audition for that company to get the account. And so they got the account, but they were so desperate for me to continue because the basis by which I got the account, which I didn’t realize at the time, is the things that I put into it. So I was doing all this.

I got to know Bert and then entered the fashion world somewhat. And when I moved to New York, I still continued to do this. In fact, the woman who was allegedly my wife or girlfriend was Mel Harris from Thirtysomething, was the girl that was the scene with me.

So I was interested in that. And Bert made ties and he made shirts. And then there was Ralph, obviously started in ties.

And here we are now, six years later, Ralph had a design committee in which they were interviewing firms in a competition to do this new headquarters, because Ralph had been on 55th Street in like 40 of the 42 apartments in one building with the doors open and so forth. The only tech, I think, left in the building was Leonard Bernstein’s sister, Shirley Bernstein. And they had to make this corporate move from this smaller organization into the big time.

So they were interviewing firms, and our being called in had nothing to do with Ralph having seen that place, but it was kind of a coincidence. We were competing against Kohn Pederson Fox, Skidmore, and other various firms. And I remember Peter, by the way, was the ultimate, authentic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

And so he would put a cigarette out in his sport coat and not care that it left a burn. And there I was sort of the opposite in a way, but never obsequious, to the point that for the interview process would I show up in anything by Ralph Lauren because I didn’t wanna seem obsequious and I wasn’t gonna carry a Samsonite briefcase with a slide projector in it. I was very careful in the interviews to wear only things that were unrecognizable, which led a bit of a streak.

And so we did win the competition to do it.

Obviously, Peter was a huge part of your life and your career who tragically passed too soon. And can you tell us a little bit about him and what that sort of collaborative experience was like working with him in terms of how the two of you clicked together and what it meant for your career?

I think Peter is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. And he never took no for an answer. He always found a way to be original and he could deconstruct anything including a computer and rebuild it.

When we did our Waterworks collection, we invented new valves that he built. He went to the jewelry district and bought soldering material and we hooked them up to the kitchen sink. He was the most brilliant inventive person.

And every time I approach a project, I often think what would Peter do? And I feel a great loss for that. The other person that I am so grateful for is Reed Morrison, who I went to Harvard Graduate School of Design with.

And we did the loft together on 20th Street. We did the house in Long Island together. And he’s taught me so much. His father was one of Saarinen’s architects and his mother also did interiors at Saarinen’s office and from Cranbrook. So he, and I still get to work with him. He inspires me and is amazing.

And then on a professional level, working with Vesovsky, but working with Richard Meier and working with Peter Bohlin and working with the Herzog office. Working with César Pelli’s office. Those collaborations, I think I’ve learned so much. And I, again, the idea that we both get to do something maybe to help each other. I’ve just learned so much. Continuing to work with Richard and his team and they’ve been great experiences.

I’m not threatened by working with brilliant people.

And, you know, there was an article in the journal, in The Wall Street Journal that called your work, and I don’t know how you would feel about this title. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to, as patron-driven architecture. And I was wondering like how you describe your work to someone today if you just meet them at a cocktail party and they’re like, oh, you’re an architect? Great, what’s your work like? Or what has your career been like?

This is a tricky thing because people will say, what’s your style? And I don’t like that word because for me, style is really the penmanship of thought. So it’s very hard to describe that.

I would say in the pursuit of rigor, of clarity, authentic and party-driven, which means bold ideas that are driven and refined. And so within the context of somewhat with a modernist attitude, you can have a lot of detailing, but the goal is to make a lot of everything look like it’s not like a lot of much, and that seemingly the solution is inevitable, and that the disciplines of architecture and interior seamlessly integrate. So it’s hard to separate that.

And that goes back to the training and to the Bauhaus and to Louis Kahn and to the sticks and the clay and all that stuff. Because I realized that perhaps the part of your brain that gets trained, which you don’t give much credit to, is form. And so I think when I was playing with balsa wood and Color-Aid papers, I didn’t give enough credit to that part of the brain that’s being trained visually and creatively that would ultimately solve problems.

And, you know, when people talk about your work, your use of light comes up a lot. And it’s probably connected to a lot of the projects that you’ve had and where they’ve been and how they’ve been situated. You know, can you talk a little bit about that?

Like in terms of, it does seem to come up a lot in your portfolio in such a wonderful way. But it’s also not something that sometimes gets focused on a lot in terms of architecture.

Well, Aalto, Meier, Le Corbusier, Kahn, light is architecture. And all the people I studied were in search of light. And light doesn’t necessarily mean bright.

It’s modulation of light. I mean, we like things to fill the air. And, you know, collaborating with Richard Meier, which we’ve done on the Surf Club and we’re doing, we did a couple of houses that have collaborated with him too.

And we’re working on a development project in Hawaii with him now. It’s about consciousness of light and not taking it for granted and how light animates a space. And the great masters were all masters of light.

Opening an art or design gallery for many would be the Herculean lift of a lifetime. But Lee opened his own, Galerie56, just a few years ago to add to his impressive list of accomplishments. There he’s done exhibitions with world-class collaborators around the globe on creators like Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce and Charlotte Perriand.

The exhibitions frequently speak for themselves but I’m always left wondering, when does he sleep? 

Then comes this sort of shift at a certain point is Galerie56, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you today. And it’s a part of an incredible building where the building is just as much a part of the gallery in a sense as the gallery contents itself.

Can you tell me a little bit about that story of how this whole thing started and the building and everything?

I’m very grateful to Izak Senbahar and Jerry Carr, Alexico and Goldman for bringing us into the 56th Lantern project with Herzog & de Meuron as it was being constructed. And we were brought in to do the sales office before the building went up, which was down the street and it was very successful. We actually simulated the curtain wall of the building in a windowless space because that curtain wall that Herzog did is a piece of magic and integrated systems in it which you’ll never see again: heating and ventilating and the baseboard, steps, curtain pockets, so forth, it’s beautiful.

And the mortgage crisis happened and the foundations were filled in for the building and it went dormant for a couple of years. Then it came back again and I was very committed to the project. We also did the renderings for the penthouse we call the Secret Garden because after 9/11 people were squeamish about being up in the air downtown.

So we had to dispel that with how we conveyed the essence of that project. And I decided I would like to be a part of the building and live in the building. So we were the last apartment to be turned over to because we were the construction office on the lowest floor.

And I felt I wanted to be a part of it. And ironically, most people wanted to be up in the air. I didn’t mind being close to the street.

So the solution we chose for that unit was to connect to the street and the unit that we did up high connected to the sky. So they were different experiences. And so during COVID, they were building an Anish Kapoor sculpture, which is, for people who don’t know, people call it the Bean of New York, but it is a compressed sphere that has been impacted by the weight of the building pushing down on the sphere at the corner.

It’s like a giant metallic sphere that’s been sort of squished.

Or a kidney bean, it looks like.

Or kind of a kidney bean, a big silver reflective thing.

Yeah, yeah. And so the ground floor was rubble and was just boarded up. And they were constructing and welding and doing things in there.

And so that space couldn’t be rented or sold because of the complications of COVID and the things that were going on with Anish and the building to create that structure. In fact, the team from London would have to go through Mexico to get here because of COVID rules. And it just got delayed and delayed and delayed as everything stopped in New York.

And so Jerry Karr, who I have such respect for from Goldman, I think the investment team was exiting their position in the building around then and turning it over to the tenant shareholders of the condo. So they called me and said to me, “Do you have any interest in that space?” And I said, “Well, we just moved across the street. I don’t really think so.” And they said, “Well, would you like to buy it?” I said, “Oh, I don’t know what I would do with that thing.”

And then they suggested of a price which they’d indicate was half of what they initially were asking. And they didn’t know the completion date and when it would actually work. Now, this was the darkest time in New York where the ambulances were lining up everywhere and everyone was really depressed.

And I thought, hmm, interest rates were like two and three quarters. We had a very small space across the street where our architecture office is. And I had been head of vetting and awards for Design Miami, Design Basel, Design Paris now, and Design L.A. as a volunteer for about 15 years.

And I had gotten to know most of the galleries and artists around the world through a lot of hard work. And I thought, well, maybe if we get this, it’s really a passion project, we wouldn’t own anything, but maybe I could kind of bring the neighborhood back by having 80 feet of windows that would open up to the street. And we could do these exhibitions, museum-like exhibitions, selling exhibitions for these galleries.

It would not only help the neighborhood by having confidence in the neighborhood and letting people in instead of keeping people out—most galleries are very secure. You have to go through reception. You can’t see what’s in there. They’re kind of private. This is all windows.

And I thought maybe if we could create these things that happen and expose the neighborhood to it. And secondly, if we could kind of complete the Jenga quality of the building so this space completed the building. I was sad to see that I’ve worked in all three Meier buildings, that the middle building now has a liquor store on the ground floor with a blinking light and a chandelier.

And I thought, oh man, that’s terrible. So it was also to kind of keep the vision of the building, open something up to the street, and then embrace the sculpture there. And then we created a lighting system which is parallel to the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center in set of color.

So we’re programmed when things happen in those buildings, we celebrate that here. So this became a kind of link from the Empire State Building to 56th Letter to World Trade. And so we did acquire it.

And Goldman and the group was covering the interest charges until the Anish Kapoor sculpture was somewhat complete where they were out of our space. And then we did a massive, way too expensive renovation there to complete the Jenga quality and then started on a program there of which to, I think it was a little over two years ago, we actually have done I think 12 programs there now.

So we started out with something called Garden of Celestial Delights, which was with Paul Jackson at Jackson’s in Stockholm and Ulla Hasbo for Dance Mobile. And it was called Garden of Celestial Delights. This is my art history background, not Garden of Earthly Delights, Bosch’s painting, because in Scandinavia, it’s a lot about light, to your point about light.

And we celebrated the artists of Scandinavia there. And then I was very interested to work on something about both Noguchi and Charlotte Perriand. And I don’t know if people know with genius François Laffanour from Gallery Downtown in Paris, Charlotte Perrion spent a lot of time in Japan.

She also spent time in Brazil. I don’t think people know she lived in these places and she did work for Kenzo Tange. And she developed a relationship with Isamu Noguchi. And then she was very influenced by Japanese design. So we did an exhibition of Noguchi and Perriand. And then I happened to meet Gaetano.

I ironically had worked on Jay Chiat’s apartment years ago.

Of Chiat/Day, the firm that Pesce did an interior for.

And now when I look back, it seems like this all kind of makes somewhat fatalistic sense somehow. I didn’t know Gaetano then, but I knew Jay. And I was getting some medical situation over at NYU Hospital.

And in the waiting room was Gaetano. Okay. So I introduced myself. And that month we had a project published in which Gaetano’s Pratt Chair was in. So he was very confused. Are you an architect? Do you have a gallery? Are you a curator? You know, what’s going on here? And I said, well, we do go way back in a funny way. And I told him about Jay and I showed him the picture of the Pratt Chair. And his name is Gaetano Pesce, if people don’t know his last name. And he said to me, “What are you in here for? In the hospital?” And he’s in a wheelchair.

I said, “I’m here for my heart. What are you here for” He said, “I’m here for urinary.” I said, “that’s because you’re a pisher.” So he took my cell phone number down. He called me the next day and he invited me over. And we didn’t wanna be in conflict with Jeanne Greenberg and Jackie Greenberg and do anything that was gonna be at odds with the relationships he’d established with other people. So in looking around, I was looking around all these drawings and they’d never seen a show anywhere. So I said, Gaetano, why don’t we, and you don’t like to frame your drawings, why don’t we call it “Gaetano Unframed?”

He said, okay, but you have to put plastic over them all and put black tape around them because I don’t believe in frames. So we bought all the black tape in Manhattan, rolls and rolls and taped the drawings up. And we had a wonderful experience.

And Gaitano was not in the best of health, came and stayed for three hours. And he died not long after that. So it was such a privilege to get to be so close to him at such a late stage in his life.

And obviously, as a backdrop to all this, I once got a little tour of your own apartment in that building. And it is filled with collectible design and art, a lot of design. And tell me about your own sort of personal collection as it stands today.

And what would you say is the piece that gets the most eye-popping wows from visitors?

I think the space gets the most eye-popping wows.

Do you consider your space part of your collection?

Yes. 

You do, okay. 

Because I feel that it’s an integrated environment that makes a collection work.

And although they’re beautiful objects, the space has to embrace that. It’s not about filling space either. Like that space looks really good empty.

That’s a collectible in a way, you know? And I’d say that people that I’m interested in deconstruct my own DNA. And those that I have followed, I kind of like to think, influence how I’ve thought.

And what was your latest acquisition that’s in your apartment?

I acquired a Tomás Saraceno’s mobile. Tell us about it. Well, he and Olafur Eliasson, they’re all about light, which you mentioned earlier.

And movement. And he’s an architect. And I remember seeing that first retrospective he had at SF MoMA, which made me fascinated about refraction.

And also I have Olafur Eliasson works. But then again, I have Corbusier and people I studied. So having a piece of my own education in front of me.

In fact, I was reminded of that. I have a loft on 20th Street. And MoMA was being reconstructed and they wanted to change the dimensions of the Kjærholm benches that were gonna go in there because the original ones were very low.

So they wanted to raise the height of them. So they had Hanne Kjærholm, who’s the widow of Poul, come to MoMA with Anna Racklin, who is responsible for educating a lot of America in Washington about Scandinavian furniture. And we had, I’ve been a fan of Kjærholm since I got out of school. And I don’t think many people knew who he was. He was the architect of furniture, they call him. So she called me up and said, we know about your respect for Scandinavian furniture.

And Poul Kjærholm, and we’re coming to MoMA. So we would like to come visit you at your loft. So I remember the day Hannah came and I was dressed as like a PK sofa. I had like a canvas belt and a stainless steel thing. And she walked into my loft, which I didn’t, I thought was okay. She started to cry. And Danes aren’t known to be that emotional. And I said, “Hannah, what is it? What is it?” She said, I’ve never seen anything like this. And it was that moment that I realized how lucky we are as Americans. Because as Americans, we are a political democracy and a design democracy. And that we celebrate all cultures here. And she, coming from a very homogeneous culture, looked around and saw things by her late husband, next to things by Le Corbusier and Gio Ponti and Hans Wegner and Tom Dixon and Calder, a juxtaposition, which is not what’s customary in Denmark. It’s the kind of beautiful standard millwork piece.

And then I realized, she said, “This is so unusual.” I said, “Thank you. Because I realized that maybe as Americans, we’re free to have a design democracy and conversation amongst all those people that are important. And I didn’t realize that you pointed that out to me, that you’re here, and I thank you for that.”

And when I had been in Denmark the year before, I snuck up to her house on the beach, not knowing her, with my head pressed against the glass, taking pictures, never thinking a year later, she would be in my loft. And the following year, she invited me to have dinner in the very place my nose was pressed on the glass and be her guest at the Kjærholm Retrospective at the Louisiana. So that was very interesting evolution of things.

And so what’s coming up in the gallery next?

We have La Dolce Vita with Nina of Niloufar in Milan, Italian masters. And it’s gonna have, I’m in awe. I’m just in awe that we get to be by the most historic things in the world that represent the most historic times.

We’ll have Carlo Mollino and Gio Ponti and BPPR. And I mean, it’s just incredible. That’s the joy of collaborating and to keep learning and to actually be able to sculpt with these pieces and create spaces for them and to share that information.

And now that you’ve been an interior designer, architect, product designer, magazine journalist, and now gallerist, which one do you think you like the most?

I wanna do set design. 

Oh, okay, might as well add one more.

What would you like to, what kind of set design would you like to do, film or theater or? Theater, theater, theater. I’ve been a big theater buff and I’m friends with a lot of people in it. And I love what David Rockwell gets to do. And Scott Pask is just unbelievable. The set for Good Night and Good Luck and for Glengarry and for Book of Mormon. Only an architect could come up with something like that. So I’m in awe of him and what fun it looks like to do that. Also, they get built quickly. We have to suffer through years of inventory of shoes and closets and storage and program and funding.

And those things, they happen rather quickly. So the idea, which I kind of get in the gallery is sort of set design in a way. You get to do it quickly.

You have to turn, the turnover is really fast. And that’s what keeps your brain exercising new challenges.

Thank you to my guest, Lee Mindel and to everyone at Novità PR for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And you can purchase the first ever print issue of The Grand Tourist online now on our website, thegrandtourist.net. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Till next time!

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