The Segal Centre for Performing Arts, formerly known as the Saidye Bronfman Centre for Arts, was designed by Phyllis Lambert in honour of her mother with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Photo Credit : Jean Gagnon
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Phyllis Lambert with the model for the Seagram Building, New York, (1955).
Photo Credit : Phyllis Lambert Fonds
Phyllis Lambert working on a sculpture portrait of her mother Saidye Bronfman, ca. 1950s.
Photo Credit : Phyllis Lambert Fonds
1927 -
Phyllis Lambert
Phyllis Lambert is an award-winning Canadian architect, social activist and philanthropist, who founded and directs the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
The second daughter of Samuel Bronfman and Saidye Rosner, Lambert grew up in Montreal. She graduated from Vassar College in 1948. While sculpting in Paris, Lambert’s father began construction of his distilling headquarters building in midtown Manhattan, and Lambert worked as the planning director. Following a master’s degree in architecture at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, she returned to Montreal to design the Saidye Bronfman Centre.
In 1975, Lambert founded the heritage preservation group Heritage Montreal. Four years later, she founded the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a museum and research centre in downtown Montreal. She retired as CCA’s director in 1999, but remains chair of the board of trustees, and an active member of the acquisitions committee.
As an activist, Lambert is deeply interested in preservation-related projects and publications. She has donated money, time and effort to revitalize Shaughnessy Village, along with protesting bad urban construction plans. She has also published books including Court House: A Photographic Document; Photography and Architecture: 1839-1939; Opening the Gates of Eighteenth-Century Montréal; and Fortifications and the Synagogue: The Fortress of Babylon and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo.
Lambert holds honourary degrees from more than 25 universities and has been made an Officer of France’s Order of Arts and Letters (1992), Companion to the Order of Canada (2001), Grand Officer of the National Order of Quebec (2005). She received an honorary DFA in Architecture from the Pratt Institute in 1990 and was awarded the Vincent Scully Prize in 2006 for a lifetime of outstanding architectural achievements in 2006. She was the 2014 recipient of the Golden Lion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and was awarded the 2016 Wolf Prize in Arts. She was the subject of a 2007 documentary called Citizen Lambert: Joan of architecture.
Learn more:
Roderick McLeod & Eric John Abrahamson, Spirited Commitment: The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, 1952 – 2007. (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010).
