The Gazette

Phyllis Lambert doesn't stand on ceremony. The founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture comes bustling into a small, brightly lit room at the front of the Shaughnessy House, the beautiful 19th-century greystone building that Lambert saved from demolition back in the heyday of her heritage activist years. It is now part of the sprawling architecture museum just off Rene Levesque Blvd. W. "Half dead," Lambert quips when a photographer asks how she's doing. But minutes later, the 80-year-old Bronfman heiress, architect, author and activist is near-sprinting across the carefully manicured lawn in front of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in the hopes of providing a lively photo-op. Though she feted the start of her ninth decade with a gala birthday bash at the Darling Foundry in Griffintown in January, Lambert still looks - as colleague Arthur Kaptainis pointed out in his piece on the birthday party - "as inscrutably middle-aged as ever."