Phyllis Lambert Celebrates Her 80th, Again
Events at NYU and MoMA honor the architect
Phyllis Lambert (far right) with Sylvia Lavin and Ricardo Scofidio
Courtesy Elise Jaffe
Phyllis Lambert celebrated her 80th birthday in New York last month at an academic symposium convened for the occasion. Though her actual birthday was in January—and though she was feted earlier this year in Montreal, where she lives—Lambert is no stranger to doing things outside of convention. With her great energy and enthusiasm, the architect, patron, Seagram’s heiress, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), and, as of this year, octogenarian, showed no signs of being anywhere remotely near her age during her attendance at a film screening and the symposium.
On Friday, October 19, the Museum of Modern Art hosted a small, private showing of a new documentary on her life for an audience of her friends, who also happen to be some of the most influential figures of contemporary architecture. Some of them, including Ricardo Scofidio, Jean Louis Cohen, and Peter Eisenman, had sound bites featured in the film.
Then on Saturday, at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, leading architects and scholars presented their recent work in As Is: A symposium in honor of Phyllis Lambert on the occasion of her 80th birthday. The program’s format covered four main areas of Lambert’s career: patronage, preservation, museum administration, and allied disciplines (in her case, photography, for example). Organized by Sylvia Lavin, professor of architecture at UCLA, it was meant to honor Lambert by advancing scholarship in those areas without explicitly engaging Lambert’s accomplishments themselves. Speakers included Barry Bergdoll, Jean Louis Cohen, Mark Wigley, Peter Eisenman, Beatriz Colomina, and Lavin. All of the presenters credited Lambert with being an important and enduring influence on them. As evidence of her exhaustive range of interests, topics ranged from Indian vernacular architecture to Andy Warhol, and from digital design to Gordon Matta-Clark—with more than a few references to what may go on at her 90th.
John Gendall