Montreal architect and urban heritage activist Phyllis Lambert is this year’s winner of Israel’s $100,000 (US) Wolf Prize for the Arts. She was cited for her six decades of championing innovation in building design and preservation of properties of patrimonial significance, as well as invigorating the profession and research into architecture.
Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1989, is among seven recipients of the 2016 Wolf Prizes, working in five fields, mostly the sciences and medicine.
The prizes will be presented in June by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in a ceremony at the Knesset.
In announcing the laureates on Jan. 13, the Wolf Foundation described Lambert’s fearless and multi-faceted role over a long period.
“Playing all possible roles of designer, planner, artist, writer, photographer, curator, museum director, patron and philanthropist, she ultimately stands for professional rigour and esthetic elegance, but also for intellectual doubt and political critique.
“From the mid-1950s to the present, she has been vigorously involved in the realization of seminal innovative buildings, exemplary urban preservation and regeneration projects and leading architectural research institutes.”
Lambert, now founding director emeritus of the CCA, commented, “I am thrilled to be the recipient of the highly esteemed Wolf Prize for the arts. It is a superb consummation for decades of passionate work.”
Lambert, 88, launched her career in the 1950s when her father, the distiller Samuel Bronfman, entrusted her with overseeing the design of the Seagram building in New York, whose chief architect was the famous Mies van der Rohe.
Founded by Ricardo Wolf, a German-born inventor and former Cuban ambassador to Israel, and chaired by the Minister of Education and Culture, the foundation has been awarding five or six prizes annually since 1978 to individuals of outstanding achievement around the world.
The awards have been dubbed the country’s Nobel Prize or the “pre-Nobel” because a significant number of laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize.
Lambert is the 11th Canadian to win a Wolf Prize, and only one other, Frank Gehry, has been for architecture, an arts category that rotates every four years among music, painting and sculpture, the Israeli Consulate in Montreal noted.
“Every day from my office window at Westmount Square – a modernist gem designed by Mies van der Rohe, an architect introduced to North America by Ms. Lambert – I thank her for her outstanding contribution to Montreal’s architectural heritage,” said Consul General Ziv Nevo Kulman.