Could it be a coincidence that minutes after reporting that Phyllis Lambert had received the Venice Architecture Biennale's Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at a ceremony earlier in the day, the radio station in my rental car (as I mbarked on a pilgrimage to Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery) broadcast the Sondheim ballad “I’m Still Here”? Lambert, 87, could have been Elaine Stritch, now 89, singing about good times and bum times, my dear.
In fact, Lambert has outlived the other co-creators of the Seagram Building—her father, Samuel Bronfman, and architects Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson—and because she’s still here, she gets the limelight. “I’ve won lots of awards, but nothing like this,” says Lambert, who also counts founding the Canadian Centre for Architecture among her contributions to design, of the honor. “This is major. Major.” She says she was particularly pleased to have been chosen by Rem Koolhaas, the director of the 2014 Biennale, who like Lambert has a sharp and restless intellect. “It’s a shame the same word—architect—is applied to people like Rem, who are asking hard questions, and people just doing commercial work,” she says.
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