Phyllis Lambert

Life and career

Born in Montreal, Quebec, she studied at The Study, a premier independent school for girls, and was educated at Vassar College (BA in 1948).

On 17 May 1949, in Montreal, she married Jean Lambert, a French-German economic consultant and the only son of Adolphe Lambert of Elmhurst, Queens, New York. The couple divorced in 1954.

In 1951 Lambert's father Samuel Bronfman established Cemp Investments, a holding company for his four children, in which Phyllis was given a 22% ownership stake. It controlled the family’s distilling empire, The Seagram Company Ltd., which over time controlled billions of dollars in liquor, real estate, oil and gas, and chemical companies. She served on the board of directors of Cemp's subsidiary, Cadillac Fairview.

Lambert moved to New York City in 1954 to learn more about architecture, and graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1963. In the 1960s, she designed the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal, named after her mother. As Director of Planning for the Seagram Building, she was influential in bringing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe onto the project, also recommending him for the Toronto-Dominion Centre design, a project on which she served as a consultant.;

In 1975, she founded the heritage preservation group Heritage Montreal. She served as its first president from 1975 to 1983.

In 1979, she founded the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a museum and research centre in Montreal's Shaughnessy Village neighbourhood, and donated 750,000 shares of Seagram to help fund the Centre. Lambert has also been an advocate in efforts to revitalize the struggling Shaughnessy Village district. In 1989, Shaughnessy House, a 19th-century mansion that Lambert purchased and saved from demolition, became part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

She also helped lead a successful fight against an earlier design for Place Montreal Trust on McGill College Avenue, which would have included an office tower that partially obscured the view of Mount Royal. Lambert even picketed the offices of project developer Cadillac Fairview, of which she was a board member.

In 1990 she received an honorary DFA in Architecture from the Pratt Institute. In 1992, she was made Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France. She holds honorary degrees from some 26 universities in North America and in Europe.

Her work also includes serving as developer on the restoration of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles by architect Gene Summers.

In 1985 she was made a Member of the Order of Canada, promoted to Officer in 1990, and promoted to Companion in 2001. In 1985, she was made a Knight of the National Order of Quebec and was promoted to Grand Officer in 2005.

Lambert was awarded the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum in 2006. Executive director Chase Rynd stated, "The Museum is honored to present its 2006 Scully Prize to Phyllis Lambert for a lifetime of outstanding achievements in the design of the built environment. From the Seagram Building to the CCA, to her work as a preservationist and educator, Phyllis Lambert has deeply enhanced the world we build for ourselves."

In 2007, Citizen Lambert: Joan of architecture, a documentary film about Lambert was directed by Teri Wehn-Damisch.

Lambert was the recipient of the Golden Lion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2016, she was awarded the Wolf Prize in Arts.

Honours and awards