Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in December 2013. Photo: CNW Group/Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Montreal’s Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, has been chosen as the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale for Architecture.
Lambert is to receive the award in a ceremony in Venice on June 7, during the opening day of this year’s Venice Biennale for Architecture.
The decision was made by the board of the biennale, chaired by Paolo Baratta.
“Not as an architect, but as a client and custodian, Phyllis Lambert has made a huge contribution to architecture,” Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who is curating this year’s biennale, said in a release. “Without her participation, one of the few realizations in the 20th century of perfection on earth—the Seagram Building in New York—would not have happened.”
As Koolhaas acknowledges, Lambert is regarded as influential in terms of bringing Mies van der Rohe onto the design of the Seagram Building. She also connected him with the Toronto-Dominion Centre project in Toronto.
Yet Lambert—born in 1927 into the Bronfman family, which grew its wealth for decades through Seagram distilleries—has also been influential in many other ways. In 1975, she founded the group Heritage Montreal, in 1979 she founded the CCA (using Seagram shares to fund it), and in 1979, she also picketed Cadillac Fairview, a company her family was heavily involved with, to protest its initial design for a tower that would block a view of Mount Royal. (The design was later changed.)
Koolhaas adds, “Her creation of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal combines rare vision with rare generosity to preserve crucial episodes of architecture’s heritage and to study them under ideal conditions. Architects make architecture; Phyllis Lambert made architects.”
Lambert is also a companion of the Order of Canada, among other honours and awards. In December 2013, close to the 25th anniversary of the CCA’s opening, she stepped down as chair of the CCA board of directors, handing the reins to architect Bruce Kuwabara.
