Phyllis Lambert is probably most famous for Building Seagram. When she was 27 and living in Paris her father showed her the initial design that Charles Luckman had prepared; horrified she wrote him an 8 page letter exclaiming why she thought their design was a mistake. Her father tasked her with an alternative. She reached out to Philip Johnson who was then the Architecture Curator at MoMA; they commissioned Mies Van Der Rohe with Johnson as the architects. Phyllis went on to study architecture, first at Yale and then at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies became her mentor. She founded the Canadian Center for Architecture.
