Phyllis Lambert

Although Phyllis Lambert initially studied at Vassar, she did not seriously consider architecture as a career until 1954 when she became involved with the Seagram Building, a New York skyscraper that her father planned to build. Involving herself with the project on force of opinion alone, she eventually convinced her father to hire Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Her father agreed to hire Mies van der Rohe on the condition that Lambert act as Director of Planning.

After working on the Seagram's Tower, Lambert returned to school to study architecture. With Mies as her mentor, she completed school and entered into practice. Although her first projects mimicked conventional Miesian design principles, her subsequent ventures showed little formal debt to Mies.

Shortly after her father's death in 1971, Lambert returned to Vancouver where she rediscovered a love for the city's graystone buildings. Appalled by the demolition of historic structures within the city, she became a vocal leader of citizen-activist groups, an organizer of housing cooperatives to save low-income neighborhoods, and a lobbyist.

Lambert is active in the International Confederation of Architectural Museums, Chairman of the Board of Columbia University's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, an advisor to the National Gallery of Canada, and a consultant to many other institutions. Although she has acted more as an architectural activist than as a practicing architect in her later years, she has been a great catalyst to modern architecture.

For 20 years, from the late 1970s to her intended departure in March 1999, Lambert headed the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, building it into a significant national cultural institution.

References
Brenner, Douglas. Architectural Record. "Phyllis Lambert: Peripatetic heroine of architecture." Vol. 176 No. 10-12 Oct. 1988. p73, 75.

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