The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is pleased to announce that Phyllis Lambert, architect and CCA Founding Director Emeritus will receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize 2016 Architecture Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. The $20,000 prize is given to an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art.
The Academy’s annual architecture awards program began in 1955 with the inauguration of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize and has since expanded to include four Arts and Letters Awards. This year’s winners were chosen from a group of 35 individuals and practices nominated by the members of the Academy. The jurors were: Elizabeth Diller (chairman), Henry Cobb, Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Hugh Hardy, Steven Holl, Cesar Pelli, James Polshek, Robert A. M. Stern, and Tod Williams.
Elizabeth Diller said that Lambert, architect, author, scholar, activist and Founding Director Emeritus of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, “is the conscience of modern and contemporary architecture, protecting its past and advocating for its future as a vital art form.” Robert A. M. Stern highlighted her role as Director of Planning for the Seagram Building
from 1954-1958 as, “one of the great acts of architectural patronage in modern times”, and that, “under Lambert’s leadership the CCA has amassed an incomparable library and staggering archive of drawings, and has mounted important public programs that have done much to rescue the profession of architecture from inertia and amnesia.”
Current Chair of the Board of Trustees of the CCA, Bruce Kuwabara, commented: “Phyllis Lambert has made an enormous contribution to how we think about architecture and cities. She has raised awareness and standards of research, scholarship, heritage preservation, and design to the highest levels.
The Arts and Letters Award in Architecture will be given to four American architects whose work is characterized by a strong personal direction or who explores ideas in architecture through any medium of expression.The recipients who will each receive a $10,000 prize are respectively, Andrew Berman, Andrew Freear, Mimi Hoang & Eric Bunge, and Theodore Prudon.