A Q&A with Daerion Williams and Maisie Berens, co-presidents of the University of Manitoba’s Indigenous Design and Planning Students Association.
A new exhibition showcases the work of Kiyoshi Izumi, the earliest known Japanese-Canadian architect.
BoON Architecture
Mindful Architecture
Leckie Studio Architecture + Design
EHA
blanchette archi.design
44 Laura Killam Architecture
Odami
40 Future Simple Studio
26 Alexandre Bernier
EMERGING AT MIDLIFE
Every few years, we dedicate an issue to showcasing emerging talent. The following pages put the spotlight on 20 firms that our curatorial team chose for the contributions they’re making to the culture of Canadian architecture. It’s a small sampling of the many firms we feel are worth watching in the years to come.
As someone in my mid-40s, I was interested to see that at least a half-dozen of the firms featured this year were founded by architects who had just turned 40. It’s an emergence story that’s familiar: an architect is employed at established firms for a dozen years, then opens up their own practice. Sometimes, there’s a precipitating incident: they’ve started a family, and can find better flexibility by being their own boss. Their peers in other fields have become established enough to now be clients, and are willing to entrust a renovation or small business design commission to their long-time friend. Or, it’s just a mid-life crisis thing. As one of our selected architects put it, there’s something about hitting 40 that makes you question: if not now, then when?
Frankly, it’s also challenging to start your own firm any sooner than 40. While decades ago, an architect’s scope of work was simpler the design drawings for a large building were sometimes only a dozen sheets, and many more details were worked out on-site with the aid of builders now, the work is much more complex. The technical requirements for buildings have become more rigorous, coordinating a wider array of specialized subconsultants is more challenging, and architects’ responsibility (and liability) has grown. Contractual obligations and relationships have also changed, creating the not-infrequent situation that architects and contractors are working in opposition rather than in concert, each aiming to avert responsibility for changes and errors. The complicated documents, details, and processes involved with architecture can’t easily be taught in architecture school, but require many years of on-the-job learning to manage effectively. This may all sound somewhat discouraging, especially in comparison to other industries,
where businesses have much younger founders. (I recently attended a tech conference where the entire convention centre seemed to be filled with would-be start-up entrepreneurs in their 20s, with laptops and world-changing ideas, hoping to attract venture capital funding.) But there are upsides to starting a firm at mid-life.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw mid-life as a critical transition between a first half of life focused on acquiring things (knowledge, material goods, success) and a second half that is more about finding meaning. We ask questions such as: “What makes me feel I am useful in this world?”
What does it mean to start a firm from this place of searching? It can often mean less focus on becoming a starchitect and more on finding ways to best contribute one’s abilities to the world, and to others.
This is palpable in many of the firms featured in Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. Most of the selected architects are less concerned with creating a signature style, and more interested in how their buildings serve particular people and needs. They want to create places that fit in with their context be it a wooded rural setting or a tight site in an urban downtown. They are interested in better understanding and working with the cultural nuance of a place. Many have deeply integrated environmental sustainability into their practices.
They’re also conscious of what their workplace is like: several of the firms spoke to our writers about how they’re working to create equitable businesses, and places that give their staff the opportunity to do their best work. Some have purposefully chosen to stay small, dedicating their attention to working with clients through all stages of projects.
The resulting work is highly accomplished, and in many cases even spectacular. We hope you enjoy the work of these firms who have much to be proud of, and a bright future ahead.
EDITOR
ELSA LAM, FRAIC, HON. OAA
ART DIRECTOR
ROY GAIOT
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
ANNMARIE ADAMS, FRAIC
ODILE HÉNAULT
LISA LANDRUM, MAA, AIA, FRAIC
DOUGLAS MACLEOD, NCARB FRAIC
ADELE WEDER, FRAIC
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PROJECTS
Mass timber school opens in Vancouver
hcma architecture + design has recently completed w k’ wan’ s t syaqw m Elementary School, the Vancouver School Board’s first school to be constructed entirely of prefabricated CLT panels. The school is part of a Vancouver School Board pilot project to assess the possibilities of mass timber.
The school’s new h n’q’ min’ m’ name means “the sun rising over the horizon” and was gifted by Musqueam Indian Band, who was inspired by the Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood where the school is located.
The $22.4 million, 3,385-square-metre school accommodates 340 students, and features abundant natural light and the extensive use of wood, including exposed mass timber. The two-storey building is planned as a series of smaller quadrants, connected by a central, double-height atrium. Classrooms are grouped into learning communities, each of which shares a central breakout space.
The K-7 school is a showcase for how locally sourced engineered wood can reduce embodied carbon, as well as act as a compelling design feature. hcma.ca
AWARDS
King Charles III Coronation Medal
The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada has announced the recipients of the King Charles III Coronation Medal. These 30 individuals have made significant contributions to their country, province, territory region, community or abroad.
The recipients are: Silvio Baldassarra (Ontario), Jonathan Bisson (Quebec), Shirley Blumberg (Ontario), Christopher Borgal (Ontario), John Brown (Alberta), Peter Busby (British Columbia), Michael Cox (Manitoba), Gerrie Doyle (Ontario), Heather Dubbeldam (Ontario), Valerie Gow (Ontario), Margaret (Meg) Graham (Ontario), Wayne Guy (Northwest Territories), Eric Haldenby (Ontario), Pat Hanson (Ontario), Peter Hargraves (Manitoba), Barry Hobin (Ontario), Leslie (Les) Klein (Ontario), Bruce Kuwabara (Ontario), Caroline Lajoie (Quebec), Yew-Thong Leong (Ontario), Marianne McKenna (Ontario), David Murray (Alberta), Diarmuid Nash (Ontario), Samuel Oboh (Alberta), Jason Robbins (Manitoba), Susan Ruptash (Ontario), Terrence Smith-Lamothe (Nova Scotia), Sim’oogit Saa-Bax Patrick Stewart (British Columbia), Terence Williams (British Columbia), and Betsy Williamson (Ontario).
The King Charles III Coronation medals will be presented to the recipients at a ceremony on October 7, World Architecture Day, during the RAIC Congress on Architecture, taking place in St. Andrews, NB. raic.org
COTE Student Competition
Three Canadian student projects are among the 10 winners of the 2024 AIA COTE Top Ten for Students Competition, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE) in partnership with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).
The competition recognizes 10 studio projects that work toward achieving carbon-neutral operations through daylighting, passive heating and cooling systems, sustainable materials, water conservation, energy generation, and other sustainable systems.
ABOVE Designed by hcma architecture + design, wək’ wan’əs tə syaq wəm Elementary School is part of a Vancouver School Board pilot to assess the possibilities of mass timber schools.
The program challenged students to submit projects that use a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology to provide design solutions that protect and enhance the environment.
The three Canadian winners are: Stonehouse: More Than a Food Bank by Yoon Hur (advised by Jaliya Fonseka, University of Waterloo); Grow by Madeline Hope Engen (advised by Jaliya Fonseka, University of Waterloo); and Pinguatigaq by Thomas Biscaro, Zian Charron and Thomas Laprise (advised by Claude Demers and André Potvin, Université Laval).
www.acsa-arch.org
WHAT’S NEW
What would a science centre at Ontario Place look like?
The Ontario government has been adamant that building a new Science Centre at Ontario Place will be preferable to reinvesting in the Ontario Science Centre at its current Toronto site. But such an assessment does not hold up to scrutiny.
In past articles, I have examined how the cost of repairing the existing Ontario Science Centre is far less than the cost of building a new, halfsized science centre at Ontario Place. I’ve also looked at how a new science centre will not be ready until 2030-2034, depriving a full generation of Ontario kids and parents from a full science centre experience.
The current article takes a more granular look at the architectural details of a new science centre, based on currently available information, and what would be lost compared to reinvesting in the existing Ontario Science Centre.
An 18%-56% reduction in exhibition space
The government claims that the current Ontario Science Centre is inefficient in its layout, and that therefore, even though the new Ontario Science Centre has half the footprint, it will have a comparable amount of exhibition space.
But as the Auditor General has confirmed, the current Ontario Science Centre is 568,000 square feet in size, with 134,000 square feet of exhibitions. The proposed centre at Ontario Place is 275,700 square feet, with 110,000 square feet of indoor exhibit space 18% less than at the current Science Centre.
The amount of exhibition space in the proposed centre risks being reduced even further, considering that several key spaces have not been accounted for properly in the government’s preliminary calculations.
TOP The wedge-shaped science pavilion allows for select glimpses of the heritage pods and cinesphere. From almost all other city vantage points, the heritage structures will be blocked from view. ABOVE A massing diagram shows how the 8.4-acre Therme recreational facility (roughly the footprint of the Rogers Centre) and the massive Live Nation concert venue bracket the infield-sized science pavilion.
In the test fit, school intake, lockers, classrooms, unloading zones, first aid, storage, and exhibition maintenance and prep areas some 23,226 square feet of functional program in all were located on the P1 and P2 parking levels. However, as the design of these parking areas has evolved, the allocated space has been given over to other essential logistical needs, including a large underground bus drop-off loop and bicycle parking. As a result, these program elements will need to be accommodated in the above-ground portions of the building.
Another inconsistency is that in the business case, the heritage pods have been counted as being 100% usable space adding up to some 40,000 square feet whereas in reality, they will need to contain washrooms, exit stairs, mechanical areas, and corridors. In the test fit, some of these items begin to be blocked in, and the gross area comes in at 32,662 square feet 7,338 square feet less than originally anticipated.
In all, this adds up to another 30,564 square feet of space that is “missing” from the space planning calculations for the centre at Ontario Place. If this space comes out of the exhibition areas directly, this means that the exhibition space would be reduced to just under 80,000 square feet a 41% reduction from the current Ontario Science Centre.
In the relocation business case, exhibitions for the proposed science centre are not fully funded. According to this document, there will be no exhibitions in three of the five pods on opening day some 20,408 square feet of exhibition. This means that when the proposed science centre at Ontario Place opens, it will have under 60,000 square feet of exhibition space 56% less than the current Ontario Science Centre.
In the currently available drawings, the 130-metre-long underground tunnel linking the science pavilion to the pods is labelled as “Pavilion Gallery Space.” Even though this is far from the optimal location for exhibitions, this comprises some 20,000 square feet of space
that will likely be “counted” as part of the Ontario Place location’s overall exhibition space. Accordingly, when the proposed science centre at Ontario Place opens, a third of its exhibition space may in reality be lower-quality space on a basement level that does triple-duty as a major circulation pathway, building flex space, and exhibition space.
Missing feature areas
What goes by the wayside when a Science Centre’s overall area is reduced by 50%, and its exhibition spaces are significantly reduced? Within the relocation business case, a few key areas are identified. To start, the new centre will not have a large immersive space that replicates the experience of the TELUS Rainforest. Even the business case admits that “this creates a gap in the overall science centre experience,” adding that “a unique and fully immersive experience is what helps create a world class tourist destination.”
There will be no adventure playground, equivalent to the Cohon Family Nature Escape and Science Plaza at the current Ontario Science Centre. “The new OSC@OP has limited outdoor space envisioned in the current plans,” the business case admits.
The planetarium, which was expected to reopen this year, will also be excluded from the new centre. “An immersive state-of-the-art modern New Planetarium is core to the science centre experience,” the report says. “Planetariums are not just for young learners,” it explains. “They welcome everyone from the community to attend public events. A state-of-the-art spectacular planetarium has the potential to engage researchers as scholars interested in engaging with the public.”
A fabrication facility, too, is absent from the plans for a new centre. Creating exhibitions is part of the Ontario Science Centre’s core mandate. It’s also part of the Science Centre’s magic: there is an immediate feedback loop from the exhibition floor to the workshop that allows the Science Centre’s exhibition designers and fabricators to hone their work in response to visitor behaviour. Observers have noted how this design process would not be nearly as effective with an off-site fabrication facility.
The current facility generates $2.5-3 million annually from exhibition sales and rentals. The government’s own pricing anticipates that leasing an appropriate space will cost $420,000 to $690,000 per year, plus an initial design and fit-out cost. While it notes that “ideally there is some proximity to the OP precinct,” the industrial spaces it prices out in its business case are chosen for their proximity to the 400-series highways not to Ontario Place.
More missing areas
Moriyama Teshima Architects, the firm that designed the original Ontario Science Centre, has compared the size of each major program component in the current Ontario Science Centre with the proposed centre.
In terms of public space, the IMAX theatre increases substantially in size, doubling its capacity from 300 to 600 seats. This is more space where it is not needed: while a large IMAX theatre may be useful for occasional evening premieres, the bread-and-butter of the Science Centre’s IMAX is frequent, daytime showings for smaller audiences. Even the relocation business case notes that the larger “capacity is rarely likely to be reached.”
Almost everything else goes down in size: the building entry and visitor amenities shrink by 43% from 46,200 square feet to 26,650 square feet, education spaces are reduced a whopping 88% from 11,700 square feet to 2,600 square feet, and the OSC School disappears entirely, as do dedicated event and rental spaces.
The lack of education spaces is particularly concerning: it will certainly mean the elimination of special immersive STEM programs geared to high school groups, such as the popular Voyage to Mars and Return to the Moon. The webpage for the OSC School a specialized program that allows grade 12 students to spend a full semester at the
Ontario Science Centre has already been taken down.
In addition to the noted 18-56% reduction in dedicated exhibition areas, the support space for those exhibitions is reduced by 38%, while overall building support spaces are reduced by 85%, and administrative spaces by 58%. The loss of support space is notable since the hallmark of an interactive science museums is the “host” concept, where staff interact with visitors, and provide demonstrations and assistance in interpreting exhibits. This program requires space both within and outside of the exhibit spaces for prep, storage and staff needs. The dramatic reduction in support spaces, along with proposed reductions of staff by at least 17% in the business case, indicates that this essential aspect of the science centre program will undoubtedly be compromised.
As mentioned in the last section of this analysis, exhibition design and fabrication spaces are absent from the proposed centre. This area is often used as part of “behind the scenes” public tours another part of the visitor experience which will be lost in the proposed relocation to Ontario Place.
While it makes sense that some areas would shrink in a half-sized science centre, one would anticipate that if the intention was to maintain exhibition spaces at the current size, then the same size of support spaces for those exhibitions would also be required. Moreover, the business plan for a new science centre is premised on growing attendance by 50% an indication that visitor amenities would need to expand, rather than shrink by 43%.
I have observed that the current Science Centre’s cafeteria space is already at capacity on weekends. It is hard to understand how a significantly smaller cafeteria could hope to accommodate a significantly greater number of visitors. In a recent summer trip to Montreal, I visited the Montreal Science Centre, which did not have an operating
ABOVE While there is discussion of moving the below-grade parkade to Exhibition Place, two underground levels will be needed for site servicing to the Therme and science centre facilities.
cafeteria and also had little by way of a dedicated student intake area in evidence. At lunchtime, my child and I were obliged to walk through the rain throughout the Old Port area looking for a food concession. In any case, we would have had trouble making our way into the science centre, since the entry area was blocked by summer campers eating brown-bag lunches throughout the hallways the kind of scenario that would be common in an Ontario Place science centre with insufficient student and visitor support spaces.
Urban design
But what would the proposed science centre at Ontario Place look like? While there are no renderings available, we can get some sense of the answer by considering the immediate context.
Although Ontario Place as a whole is large, the proposed science centre would occupy a relatively constrained site between two private developments: the Therme indoor water theme park and spa, and the enlarged 29,000-capacity Live Nation concert venue. The Therme development has a footprint of 8.4 acres, comparable to the footprint of the Rogers Centre (formerly SkyDome). The proposed Science Pavilion’s footprint on the mainland is 88% smaller about the size of that baseball stadium’s infield.
Detailed plans are not yet available for the Live Nation venue, but its new footprint will be of a similar scale to the Therme development, as seen in publicly available site diagrams.
Architect Brian Rudy of Moriyama Teshima Architects describes the situation like this: “This diagram strikes me as the most blatant representation of the problem: the massive Therme on one side, the huge future expansion of Live Nation on the other side with the half-sized science centre squashed in the middle, almost literally as an afterthought. The science centre is like several leftover and insufficient bits and pieces of ill-arranged garnish, sandwiched between two slices of bloated and soggy white bread.” He adds: “How can the science centre possibly stand on its own to create its own identity let alone create an environment for inspiration and learning in this location, squished between these two giant money generators?”
The Science Pavilion occupies a tight site, against Lakeshore Boulevard and the Martin Goodman Trail to the north, and Lake Ontario
to the south. There are two entrances to the Pavilion: a car drop-off to the east, and an entrance off an outdoor plaza to the west. (The same outdoor plaza also gives access to the Therme project.) Even though some reports say that the building is four storeys high, the “roof” includes a substantial built-up portion, so the true height of the building is five storeys. Overall, it will be around 115 feet tall almost twice as high as the 60-foot-tall Cinesphere.
The moniker “pavilion” is somewhat deceptive, since “pavilion” usually indicates a low-slung, one-storey-high building. Instead, the science building will essentially form an opaque wall between Lakeshore Boulevard and the waterfront. While this means that the building will block views of the heritage Cinesphere and Pods, the Science Pavilion’s wedge shape allows for glimpses of those structures from Lakeshore Boulevard and the Martin Goodman Trail, approaching Ontario Place from the east. From the west, views of the Cinesphere and Pods will be blocked by the Therme development.
In the original proposal, the Science Pavilion sits atop a five-storey, 2,000-car underground parkade meant to serve Ontario Place as a whole, including dedicated parking spots that the province is obliged to provide under its signed lease with Therme. (It is anticipated that the lease agreement with Live Nation will similarly require dedicated spots.) And while there is some discussion about this site-wide parking moving across the street to Exhibition Place, the need will likely remain for the Science Pavilion and Therme entrance pavilion to include two underground levels.
This is because of several shared services that take place in that underground area: notably, a double-height bus drop-off loop, shipping/receiving zones for both the science centre and Therme, and an underground car drop-off zone for Therme. While for many buildings, such services are located at street level, the tightness of the
Ontario Place site makes these functions virtually impossible to accommodate anywhere except underground.
The P1 level also includes an underground link, which would allow for science centre visitors to connect to the exhibition-containing Pods and Cinesphere without exiting the ticketed zone. After travelling through the link, visitors would pop up into a tower squeezed next to the Therme entrance pavilion, from which a bridge crosses over to the elevated pods.
Visitor Journey
As a visitor to a science centre at Ontario Place, you would be dropped off at the east entrance or underground, travel through three floors of exhibitions, then travel through a tunnel and series of bridges to see the pods and Cinesphere.
Off the bat, there are some aspects of this journey that are less than ideal. IMAX theatres are typically located near the entrance of science centres, rather than at the end: this allows people to access them as a separate attraction, and also to more easily select a show time without having to account for finding and making one’s way to the theatre. (As a mother with a young kid, I can tell you that making it to a ticketed show, at an unknown distance, for a specific time slot can be challenging.)
Moriyama Teshima’s office has performed a helpful exercise of diagramming out what this visitor journey would look like, in comparison to a visitor journey at the current Ontario Science Centre. In the current Ontario Science Centre, a one-way trip that includes all of the exhibitions entails a 730-metre walk. In the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, that same trip would be 1.3 kilometres long almost twice the distance to see less exhibit space. While good for those counting steps, a longer journey can pose accessibility issues for older visitors, such as grandparents, or anyone pushing a stroller.
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A risky proposition
The inclusion of a 130-metre-long underground tunnel and some 400 metres of bridges not only creates a long visitor journey, but also makes the building vulnerable to future major repair requirements.
As architect Brian Rudy explains: “As we have seen, the existing Ontario Science Centre had a vulnerability when the bridge between Buildings A and B was deemed unsafe and closed to the public. While we may debate why the province didn’t immediately set to fixing this 60-metrelong bridge, imagine the vulnerability of the approximately 400 metres of bridge as part of the OP proposal, and then also consider that this bridge is already over 50 years old.” He adds, “Speaking of vulnerabilities, also imagine a 130-metre-long tunnel built right next to and 2.5 metres below the waters of Lake Ontario [as it is shown in current sections]. Are we confident that the provincial government 50 years in the future will be willing to invest in a 50-year-old leaky tunnel?”
Rudy also notes that the presence of so many bridges makes for a very inefficient structure echoing the Province’s key criticism of the existing building. The Province wrote in its business case that “the 568,000 square feet of the [current Ontario Science Centre] is expansive and spread across three buildings and multiple levels, creating a highly inefficient structure…[resulting] in a significant amount of inefficient spaces.” Says Rudy: “While it is hard to argue that the existing Ontario Science Centre is the most efficient building in the world, the Ontario Place proposal will almost certainly be less efficient than the existing Ontario Science Centre given its constrained five-storey pavilion footprint, long tunnels, and bridges connecting relatively small spaces over a vast area. This lack of efficiency will cost more to build, cost more to maintain over the long run, and likely result in further compromises and reductions of usable (ie. exhibition) space.”
ABOVE The proposed science centre relies on a 130-metre-long underground link and 400 metres of bridges to connect to the Pods and Cinesphere.
Customized design vs. P3
As with most endeavours, the process affects the product. In the case of the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, the architectural outcome will largely be related to the way it is procured: through a publicprivate-partnership, or P 3.
A traditional procurement model for a building is straightforward: the client (Infrastructure Ontario and the Ontario Science Centre) would vet a number of architects, then choose one to work with in designing a building to suit their needs and the site. As part of this process, other sub-consultants, such as engineers and heritage specialists, are brought on to the team. When the design is complete, contractors are invited to bid on constructing the project. This is how all museums and cultural facilities in Ontario and Canada have been designed to-date.
Introduced in 2005 in Ontario, the P 3 model is typically used for large infrastructure projects and buildings, including highways, hospitals, courthouses, and sporting venues. In this model, Infrastructure Ontario first vets and hires a compliance architect, who puts together a master specification, known as the Project-Specific Outcome Specification (PSOS). Instead of dictating the final design, this is intended to be a general specification that lists all of the project’s requirements, but doesn’t foreclose opportunities for saving money through a creative solution to those requirements.
Three teams each consisting of a contractor, architect, and subconsultants such as engineers are then invited to submit bids that include the price to design, build, finance, and maintain the project for a specified number of years. Once the winning team is selected, they are responsible for the full execution of the project.
In theory, this process results in competitive bidding, taxpayer savings, and the transfer of risk to the private sector. But as auditor general Bonnie Lysyk pointed out in a report nine years ago, this is not the reality of how P3s have played out. Because the private sector is taking on financing costs at a higher cost than the public sector, is responsible for higher ancillary costs (such as legal, engineering, and project management fees), and tends to over-price project risks, Lysyk concluded that the cost of the 74 projects taken on between 2005-2015 was 29% higher than if the same projects had been managed through traditional procurement costing the government an additional eight billion dollars that decade.
Yet, P 3s remain attractive to governments. This is largely because, despite evidence to the contrary, they still have the appearance of carrying taxpayer savings. In a Design-Build-Finance-Maintain con-
tract the kind being used for the proposed Ontario Place project costs are paid for in installments over a long period, usually 30 years. This means that a project can be started while putting little cost on the government’s books, with the majority of costs ultimately passed along to future governments.
For architects, the downsides of P3s are well-known. Bidding for a P3 can involve a massive amount of work that isn’t sufficiently compensated a significant financial gamble for any office. The selection process generally weighs heavily on the side of lowest cost, rather than the most innovative design. As a member of the winning proponent team, architects work for a developer-contractor, not for the building’s users. Often they have little direct contact with the client. On both proponent and compliance sides, reams of paperwork can bog down a project’s progress as well as the morale of employees.
Many players in the industry feel that overall, P3s also represent poor value for the built environment. With few exceptions, P3 projects fall short of the architectural quality that might have been achieved with a comparable budget, under a traditional stipulated-sum contract.
Because of its complex preparatory setup and legalistic nature, the P 3 process also has a longer timeline than traditional projects.
For the proposed science centre at Ontario Place, the government has so far completed the selection of a compliance architect. An RFQ was issued for proponent teams last spring, with submissions due on July 4; an RFP with the completed PSOS is expected to be issued to the finalist teams in early November. At this rate, a proponent team would not be selected until 2025 or 2026. Construction documents and approvals would still need to be completed from that point. Optimistically, construction would not be finished until 2030, with exhibition installation and commissioning taking some months longer.
This timeline correlates with the government’s RFP for a temporary science centre location, which asks for a lease going until 2030, with the possibility of yearly extensions until 2034. As I have written, the only plausible explanation for this long lease is that the Province does not expect the OSC at Ontario Place to be open until 2030-2034 not 2028, as they have been telling the public.
Reopen, renew and reinvest
Overall, a new science centre at Ontario Place will be a shadow of what we have at the Ontario Science Centre’s current location. It will have significantly less exhibition space, will lack key feature areas, and will lose other important program areas, including educational spaces, event rental areas, the OSC school, and support spaces.
The proposed science centre at Ontario Place will be compressed on its site, where it will be dwarfed by the private Therme and Live Nation developments. It will necessitate a visitor journey that is twice the length, to see fewer exhibits. The P 3 process by which it is being constructed will mean poorer quality architecture, delivered on a longer timeline.
The Moriyama-designed building was closed just three months ago, and while reopening it and performing necessary repairs will take some doing, it can happen more quickly than preparing a temporary location (which would not open until 2026) or pursuing a relocation to Ontario Place (which would not open until 2030-2034).
The right decision is clear: Ontario must reopen, renew, and reinvest in the Ontario Science Centre at its current location.
-Elsa Lam
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IPresident’s Letter
Dora Ng President, AIA Canada Society
t has been a busy few months for AIA Canada Society, as we organized three in-person events—held in Banff, Vancouver and Toronto. We thank our partners at the Alberta Architects Association, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Lightform Toronto, and ZAS Architects + Interiors for making these happen. Not only did we have a chance to connect with our members, promote networking, and share design excellence, but we also extended invitations to student groups to encourage collaboration and support future generations of architects and designers.
In this October issue of the AIA Canada Society Journal, our feature article aims to support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in our profession. Indigenous architects and consultants are in high demand, and we are experiencing a surge of projects on which these valued professionals are being asked to contribute to the design of spaces that speak to the cultures, ceremonies and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples.
In order to support the next generation of Indigenous architects and designers, in 2019, students at the University of Manitoba
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formed the Indigenous Design & Planning Students Association (IDPSA). We interviewed the current co-presidents of IDPSA to learn more about their initiatives and programs, and to better understand the unique voice of these emerging professionals.
In coming years, we hope to see more students with diverse backgrounds enrol in architecture schools. Such a development would ideally result in the broadening of perspectives on inclusive design that respects all cultures and societies.
Among the many EDI resources that are available from AIA, the Equitable Development Framework is a guideline document that helps architects to explore their roles in advancing equitable communities. To download the framework document, visit www.aia.org
AIA Canada Society Design Awards
There is still time to submit for the 2024 AIA Canada Society Design Awards. The awards program runs annually each fall to recognize best practices, innovative thinking and design excellence in the work of AIA members and future design professionals in Canada. Submission categories include Architecture, Interior Architecture, Special Projects, Urban Design, CommunityEngaged Design, Open International, Unbuilt, Residential (new category this year) and Student. For eligibility, criteria and submission details, please visit aiacanadasociety.org
AIA Women’s Leadership Summit Chicago, October 8-10, 2024
Past President Lara Presber, AIA, current President Dora Ng, AIA, and Vice President Pauline Thimm, AIA, will be presenting the session “Empowering Leadership Through Storytelling” at the AIA Women’s Leadership Summit in Chicago on October 9, 2024. This active workshop will engage the audience for a lively cross-generational discussion to build resilience, celebrate success, embrace vulnerability, and share hero stories. We hope to see you there! www.aia.org/womens-leadership-summit
Q&A with Daerion Williams and Maisie Berens, co-presidents, University of Manitoba Indigenous Design and Planning Students Association
Pauline Thimm Vice President and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, AIA Canada Society
As we celebrate the inspiring professionals who will lead our professions into the future, it’s also important to be aware of what it takes to get there for those who are underrepresented.
While First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples make up 4.9 percent of the general population, their representation in professions such as architecture, interior design and landscape architecture remains marginal.
The RAIC’s Indigenous Task Force notes that there are only 20 qualified Indigenous architects currently practising in Canada— representing 0.2 percent of architects in the country. In 2016, about one percent of landscape architects identified as Indigenous in 2016. Indigenous representation rates are
AIA International Conference Hong Kong, October 24-27, 2024
This three-day conference explores the architectural intelligence we refined from the past, and the intelligence we are harvesting from multiple new technologies going towards the future. The conference includes tours of masterpieces from world-renowned architects, as well as global speakers who will address tough questions on sustainability, urban planning, and hospitality design. www.aiainternational.org www.aiahk.org/ic-24
similar for interior design, at less than one percent of the profession, and for engineering programs, accounting for only 0.6 percent of undergraduate enrolment and 0.73 percent of the profession.
The University of Manitoba’s Winnipeg campus is located in the centre of Canada, in the city with the country’s highest proportion of urban Indigenous peoples. As a university, U of M enrols one of the highest percentages of Indigenous students in the nation. A groundbreaking student organization has emerged here—the Indigenous Design and Planning Students Association (IDPSA).
The organization took root in 2018, through the inspired efforts of co-founders Reanna Mersaty and Naomi Ratte. It became an official student association in 2019. IDPSA is the first of its kind, as a student-led community-building and advocacy organization for Indigenous design students.
As we consider the experience of this exemplary organization, AIA Canada recognizes that the need and desire for improved equity within architectural education has repercussions throughout our profession. As part of its Guides For Equitable Practice, the AIA has developed a Supplement on Equity in Architectural Education that acknowledges how attaining an increase in diversity and creating a welcoming culture for all within academia accelerates progress towards equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in each sector of the profession.
AIA Canada’s Pauline Thimm recently spoke with current IDPSA co-presidents Maisie Berens and Daerion Williams to learn more about the journey of Indigenous students into our profession, and how organizations like IDPSA are breaking new ground—and paving the way for others to follow.
Welcome, Dae and Maisie. How would you like people to know you?
I’m Daerion Williams . I’m entering my second year of undergrad in landscape architecture at U of M. I am also an Indigenous designer.
I am an Indigenous and mixed European woman with family in Norway House Cree Nation, Ireland, Germany, Scotland, and Wales. Each has history and traditions that have inspired me to pursue an occupation that allows me to make positive change to urban spaces in Canada. My Indigenous identity was not initially something I expected to hold in the forefront here in my studies, but these two threads immediately became woven together—it’s exciting and also terrifying.
I’m starting my second term of leadership with IDPSA.
The IDPSA
The IDPSA Constitution outlines a clear framework for promoting Indigenous representation and support in the field of design and planning, aiming to create a more inclusive and culturally rich environment within the Faculty of Architecture and beyond. It calls for a commitment to integrating Indigenous perspectives and principles into design education, reflecting a broader movement towards reconciliation and inclusion in academia and the design profession.
IDPSA’s Calls to Action
The IDPSA’s Calls to Action, listed below, aim to guide the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in fostering an inclusive environment that respects and incorporates Indigenous perspectives, supports Indigenous students, and promotes allyship.
Recruitment and Retention
• Collaborate with Indigenous Organizations and Resources
• Improve Retention
• E ngage with Urban and Rural Communities
Representation
• Indigenous Content Steering Committee
• A nnual Events: Indigenous speakers at cultural events
Advocacy
• Days of Awareness
• Current Issues in Curriculum
Foundation
• Cultural Awareness Training - Students
• Cultural Awareness Training - Staff
Resources
• Scholarships
• Mental Health Supports
Student Organizations
• Advocate for IDPSA Goals
I’m Maisie Berens. I am Anishinaabe and a member of Berens River First Nation, located in Treaty 5 territory.
I have just graduated with my Bachelor of Environmental Design, and am starting my Masters of Interior design (a two-year program) this fall.
As far as I am aware, I am in line to be the second professional Anishinaabe interior designer in Manitoba. I would love to become my own boss and open my own design firm that specializes in hospitality spaces.
This is my first year as co-president of IDPSA.
What drew you to the built environment design professions? How did you end up here?
Dae // I grew up “artsy”—designing clothes and room interiors. I loved drawing, but I was initially intimidated by the idea [of pursuing a design profession]. I was discouraged initially because I was under the impression that design professions were all math-based.
I didn’t do well in math in high school. I also struggled with exams and memory-based learning, so I was not sure that a post-secondary education in design was even an option. Once I learned that excelling in every aspect of math wasn’t necessary, I was encouraged to pursue this path. I realized it was worth trying to do an undergrad [in environmental design] that is project-based, instead of exam-based, to see if I liked it.
And I have. I have also excelled quite a bit, and I am doing well in classes. I work hard to have my projects look good and make sense. And I am able to put myself in my projects—I am really proud of this.
Studying landscape architecture represents a lot of things that I hold dear: working with the land and advocating for things that can’t speak. Where I live now, in Winnipeg, [this means] waterways, the importance of the riparian edge, and looking after the “lungs of the city” and its richness and diversity.
Maisie // My journey into architecture started later—I was 24 when I started at university, and I didn’t know about the architecture program coming in. When I heard about it, I also thought a strong background and ability in math was needed.
Since am not strong in math, it didn’t seem like an option for me. But then I learned about the Bachelor of Environmental Design program, and I was curious to learn more.
I booked a meeting with an advisor who reviewed my high school transcript. He told me that although it would be a long journey to get the grades and meet the requirements for application, I could do it. It took me three years to get into the Bachelor of Environmental Design program, and then three years to finish it.
You’ve both persevered despite obstacles in getting here. Can you speak to this experience personally, and from what you are observing in your communities? What are the hurdles?
Maisie // I have seen how Indigenous academic success isn’t always the first thing on the mind of teachers and school principals. There is often a default to pushing these students into the trades.
I want to see Indigenous kids given some hope instead—some sense that they can dream beyond just what is shown to them as a [limited] list of jobs to aspire to. There is nothing wrong with being those things, or pursuing those paths. But I did get the overwhelming feeling of being put in a box, and being told that this is all I can amount to. What Indigenous kids need is support and hearing stories from those who have succeeded, beyond the limited futures we are often shown.
Now look at us—Dae and me. Despite both of us not doing the best in high school, we’re copresidents of a large student group at the University of Manitoba. We have people coming to us, seeking us out for our opinions, wanting to hear about our ways of life. People are asking for our leadership.
Our built professions lag significantly in adequate Indigenous representation. Based on your experiences, how could other Indigenous students be attracted?
Dae // To draw more Indigenous students, programs should seek to really understand how accessible they are.
Maisie // Sometimes it is difficult to see the possibilities, to know there is more opportunity out there. We need to help kids and teachers understand why it’s important not to sideline people and leave them out systematically, and underestimate their potential. Don’t assume what people should do, or are capable of.
How does IDPSA support this need?
Maisie // The basis for IDPSA and its Calls to Action is responding to what we as Indigenous students in this faculty have identified that needs to happen to support our place in this program, and to provide a path into it.
For example, providing a solid foundation of knowledge and cultural awareness through training for staff and non-Indigenous students is important to create a welcoming environment, where we can succeed and be role models for Indigenous kids.
I’ve seen attempts to incorporate Indigenous values into project requirements in studio without really knowing what they are, or taking the time to learn. For example, we’ve been asked to refer to the medicine wheel on projects, or simply add a totem pole—without understanding what these elements are, or how they are incorporated into the built environment. Totem poles are not relevant to Manitoba-based First Nations’ culture—they are a form of expression and significance specific to First Nations on the West Coast.
Dae // I agree. Just adding a totem pole, a medicine wheel on the ground, or a Métis infinity symbol—it becomes tokenism. Indigenous design is so much more [than reflecting simple images]. We understand that everything has a spirit, everything is worthy of respect, everything is worthy of being considered in design— from the small pebbles, to the tree roots, the bugs—everything is worthy.
Maisie // Also, we like to remind [settlers] that “Indigenous” is a blanket term that can be applied to multiple groups. In Manitoba, there
are five different Indigenous groups alone—two types of Cree, Inuit, Anishinaabe, Métis, Dene. We get thrown into same category. The problem is when there is a belief that we are all the same, with the same values.
While there are good intentions, this outcome can be offensive instead. It demonstrates a lack of cultural awareness. IDPSA’s Calls to Actions include cultural training: a one-day training session to learn about the people of this land where FAUM is located, because connection to the land is elemental and requires specificity. Being of a place means knowing the place first.
Dae // There is real value in considering the land and the people and all these things around you.
Design is about people, it’s about connections. It is about creating things that will inspire others. It is uplifting and energizing— it gives you energy, even when you might be up for four or five days straight, working to finish a project for a deadline.
Design the world for people with the people in mind—this is so important! This is what keeps me here: being able to talk to and include the voices of those who may not otherwise take part, but who want to share and make their voices known.
David Fortin, a Métis architect who also teaches design the University of Waterloo, has noted how important it is to encourage Indigenous students to “show up” in their work and have the ability to allow their ancestors to speak through them. Can you comment on your experiences with the way design is approached in your studies and studios?
Maisie // For the Interior Design department, currently there is no Indigenous representation within the staff, professors, or instructors.
I also feel like the projects that students work on have not resonated deeply with Indigenous students. This is something for the University to reflect on, and to work to improve in the future.
We also recognize that we do have some amazing support within the broader Faculty of Architecture context. Having Elder Valdie Seymour as an Elder-in-Residence here is huge—and we recognize that this level of support is not necessarily available on other campuses in Canada.
Dae // For Landscape Architecture, we are lucky to have Bret Huson on the teaching staff. There aren’t many Indigenous students in the landscape program, but he really advocates for an Indigenous design process by coming to crits and helping us work through it all. He helps us incorporate two-eyed seeing as a way to bring
Elder-in-Residence Valdie Seymour addresses a crowd to share Anishinaabe teachings regarding traditional ceremonies during a spring Feast event at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture. Members of IDPSA at the event include Daerion Williams (fourth from left), and Maisie Berens (third from left).
Indigenous traditions together with modern ways. It is such a beautiful thing not to have to separate them as approaches.
We are really lucky to have these people [Elder Valdie and Bret] available to help and attend reviews, and be there with us to ask the right questions—to not just push modern design practices, but also acknowledge and incorporate Indigenous values.
When the ancestors speak through you—it refers to the idea of designing for seven generations behind and ahead of you. It’s about using these values to guide what are you creating, and being aware of how it affects those in the future.
How do we learn this together? Having good representation is a foundational piece—first, you have to be there. How can we do things differently? How can everyone take part?
Dae // We do have amazing profs—both European and Indigenous—and this has allowed us to soar. This access to representation and support lets us explore. It is really wonderful.
Maisie // I also like how we are able to open up the conversation: recognizing that there are other Indigenous perspectives, from Indigenous students from outside of North America. Settlers also have amazing ideas.
Are instructors changing how they deliver courses?
Maisie // In history class, we got to pick a continent and community—something outside of regular curriculum—to study in depth, to listen and talk about it in a way they would not have otherwise done before. There is an impressive diversity of students in general at U of M, and we are getting a chance to see how others navigated colonialism in other parts of the world. We are seeing students coming to Canada from elsewhere who are able to explore their cultures. It inspires us to do the same.
As a result of IDPSA and increases in Indigenous student presence, the act of bringing yourself forward, when traditionally that has not been the case, is catching on.
IDPSA is a truly unique organization within the landscape of Canadian design schools, and perhaps beyond. Can you share a bit more details about the IDPSA origin story, understanding neither of you were actively involved at that time? How did you get involved?
Maisie // IDPSA was co-founded by Reanna Mersaty and Naomi Ratte in 2018, and became official in 2019, as a response to a desire for Indigenous students to come together and
make sure we are connected, and to share similar experiences. It was really needed because we are only a small population. It was also a response by Indigenous students who were repeatedly hearing inaccurate Indigenous histories, and were frustrated at being told a history of our own people that was written by settlers and was inaccurate. Those stories didn’t reflect any understanding of the value systems of Indigenous communities: how we value land, money, and survival, and how knowledge is passed on. Our stories reflect our experiences and represent how we share knowledge—not from a book, but from lived experience. We needed to create Calls to Action to demand that people who know what they are talking about are involved.
If we’re going to do architecture, let’s do it right!
How have IDPSA’s goals evolved since 2019? What are some of your goals for this upcoming school year?
Maisie // We are fortunate that we have a strong base to work from, thanks to past IDPSA leaders. To adapt to the constant change in leadership as students come through the program, we have each needed to recreate relationships with past alumni and others.
We are now also striving to create stronger relationships within the University of Manitoba in general. We connected with engineering students at ENGAP (Engineering Access Program) for Indigenous students to get into, prepare for, and succeed in the U of M Price Faculty of Engineering, and we will also look at other groups where we can support the uplift of Indigenous students. We have started to organize regular
and ongoing events, such as Feasts for the broader U of M community to come together at.
Our next goal is to expand our reach and connect with ILANDS, the Indigenous students at UBC SALA (School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture) [Currently the only other similar student organization for the design programs.] Knowing that we can support each other is important. We are looking for ways to connect with other Indigenous student groups on other campuses. We don’t know if there are many others yet, in the US in particular. We are such a small community! We will start with connecting to those groups that already exist, and we are also looking to help others launch.
As part of our Advocacy goal, we have also reached out to local high schools, and we have secured funding to help. We plan to get out to meet and visit students from the schools in person.
Do you have any words of encouragement for other design students or schools who are interested in developing something similar to IDPSA?
Dae // Don’t be afraid or nervous to reach out! We want to connect with all Indigenous students across Canada. Don’t be afraid to take that step: there will be people around you who want to see this thrive. The more presence we have, the more support grows, the better design will be because of new perspectives coming into the field that were not heard from before.
Maisie // Be strong. Don’t let the imposter syndrome get to you. Everyone brings something to the table, so use your passion to strengthen your voice and to support those around you.
Any words of wisdom for employers in support of emerging Indigenous practitioners?
Maisie // For employers, they should understand that you need people in the room to design for them effectively. You can’t be disconnected from those you are designing for. You need to talk to these people and listen to understand what they need, and to know what the correct process is to show you respect them, in order to get the respect back—to build the relationship to keep going. Don’t just rely on getting Indigenous people to come and talk—have them on the team, we also need scholars from those fields. Research is not enough.
For more information, follow @um.idpsa on Instagram and visit www.aia.org/resourcecenter/guides-equitable-practice
Eight members of the IDPSA gather as part of Storefront MB’s Table for 1200, an annual pop-up dinner.
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MARKETING WHEN YOU’RE A TINY TEAM
TEXT Daniela Furtado
HAVE TIME TO MARKET YOURSELF? HERE’S WHY.
I’m a marketing consultant, and every January starts the same way for me. Principals tell me they want to take their marketing seriously. “This year, I don’t want to just ‘make it’ with referrals,” they say. Some sign on with us, and others ask me to check back in a few months. By spring, many of them have lost steam. They said they would add recent projects to their website and post weekly on social media. But they can’t remember the last time they logged in to their accounts, let alone scheduled an update.
According to a Forbes survey, 87% of people abandon their New Year’s Resolutions by April. But if you’re in this group, it’s not because you’re lazy or procrastinating.
I believe this happens when you don’t have the systems to simultaneously work on the business and in it. It’s like trying to eat healthy in a food desert. Your environment doesn’t make it possible let alone easy for you to make a change.
The Feast to Famine Cycle
In business, it’s called the “feast-to-famine” cycle. You spend months chasing new work. But once it’s secured, you’re so busy working that lead generation falls to the back burner, and you don’t have anything else lined up for when the project ends. Stressed and anxious, you repeat the pattern all over again. Since you keep selling from a place of scarcity (hence “famine”), you’re more likely to take on work you don’t really want, or to underprice just to make the sale never leaving enough money left over to invest in your growth.
It’s a pattern service-based business owners get trapped in. Through our marketing agency, we’ve spent years wrestling to understand and help pull firms out of the feast-to-famine cycle, including our own. Why does it happen? And how can you avoid it?
I can boil it down to five points.
Problem #1. You only market when it’s quiet. Marketing doesn’t work when you’re doing the bare minimum or being inconsistent. It thrives off compounded effort. It’s a lot like investing
in the stock market. If you only invest $20 a year, or if you pull out every six months, it doesn’t reach its full potential.
Instead, prioritize marketing year-round. Even when you’re busy. Make it easy and enjoyable for yourself, yet still impactful for the company. Do less, but show up often, starting with a little a day. Hire help, even if it’s just a part-time virtual assistant. Make it an essential part of your business and day-to-day operations.
Problem #2. You’re stuck in the weeds of client work. You can’t dedicate as much time as you’d like on sales because you have to help your team get the work done. Usually, this is because you’re the most senior person in the company.
If you want to get out of the cycle, you may need to hire more experienced team members and build processes for your team to solve problems without you.
Zoe Feldman is a designer who’s figured this out. In a Business of Home podcast interview, she shares how she built her operations to create space for designing and sales marketing, while also avoiding getting caught up in the details.
Problem #3. You don’t have a proper business development strategy. Say you hired a project manager tomorrow, and she reduced your workload by 40%. What would you do? If you had the time to focus on business development, would you know how?
My advice is to start with positioning. What are you an expert in? Who is willing to pay a premium for it? Why? And where are they? Then work backwards to create a marketing strategy, both online and offline.
Problem #4. You didn’t factor marketing into your finances. Whether you’re marketing in-house or out, someone has to pay for it. If you’re not budgeting for it, it’s eating up your profit margins.
Once you have a strategy in place, research how much it will cost to execute it. How many hours will you dedicate monthly between you and your team? Multiply this by your hourly rate. Will you hire subcontractors? Purchase software? What about ad spend or events?
Whatever the final dollar amount is, include it in your pricing and start putting it aside with every deal you close. Something I wish I had done earlier in my own agency was to make sure the projects I signed on today paid for the marketing I did tomorrow.
Problem #5. You don’t think you’re worth promoting.
I almost didn’t add this, but I remembered what Atomic Habits author James Clear said: “The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first.” If you think that sales, marketing and selfpromotion are icky, then no amount of spending or systems-development will get you out there.
Solving these problems will require you to rethink and restructure many aspects of your business. You’re building a foundation and setting it up to run and grow without you at the epicentre. This takes time and patience. Not months, but years. It can be uncomfortable, but as long as you’re committed to it, the feast-to-famine cycles will get shorter. And frankly, you can always choose to stop growing. At some point, you’ll find a sweet spot. With enough trial and error, you’ll learn how much business development is enough for you, before it feels like you’re just feeding a beast.
Daniela Furtado is a consultant, speaker, and writer on how to make businesses easy to find online. She helms Findable Digital Marketing, a boutique agency in Toronto. Her team uses search engines to help businesses quintuple their website traffic and triple their sales enquiries. They specialize in the design and build industry.
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TWENTY + CHANGE: NEW PERSPECTIVES
THIS YEAR’S SHOWCASE OF 20 EMERGING PRACTICES HIGHLIGHTS PERSPECTIVES INCLUDING PREFABRICATION, ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY, AND CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACHES TO DESIGN.
Three years ago, Canadian Architect and Twenty + Change first partnered to bring a curated showcase of emerging Canadian architectural practices to the pages of this magazine. This year, we are thrilled to have done so again.
The sixth edition of Twenty + Change, called New Perspectives, is the result of an open call for submissions, and careful consideration by a curatorial team representing architectural practices from across the country many of whom were showcased in earlier editions of Twenty + Change. The team included Marie-Chantal Croft of Écobâtiment (Quebec City), Susan Fitzgerald of FBM (Halifax), Andrew Hill of StudioAC (Toronto), Ben Klumper of Modern Office of Design + Architecture (Calgary), and ourselves, Heather Dubbeldam of Dubbeldam Architecture + Design (Toronto) and Elsa Lam of Canadian Architect (Toronto).
One of the trends we observed in this year’s selection was the rise of firms rooted in environmental sustainability practices. Three of the firms chosen this year architecture écologique (Montreal), BoON (Quebec City), and Poiesis (Toronto) boast one or more Passive House-certified designers, giving them the expertise to design buildings that require minimal operating energy.
Other firms, such as COMN (Toronto) and Alexandre Bernier (Montreal), are focused on infill housing, contributing towards a vital component of a sustainable future. Further west, AtLRG (Winnipeg) has built a reputation for tackling complex urban sites, from new-builds to office-to-residential conversions.
One of the most ambitious change-makers in our showcase is Mindful Architecture (North Vancouver), a partnership between an architect and an industrial designer with a patented cradle-to-cradle living wall system. Their mass timber Métis Cultural Centre in Fort McMurray, Alberta, is currently under construction, and projects in development include insulation made of human hair, and a 3D -printed solar pit house inspired by traditional circular Indigenous dwellings.
The idea of replacing conventional construction with technologydriven solutions is also key to projects by Leckie Studio Architecture + Design (Vancouver) and VFA Architecture + Design (Toronto). While
both firms practice conventionally, they also have side-hustles: Leckie’s Backcountry Hut and TripTych are prefabricated designs for cabins and urban housing; VFA’s Ukkei Homes harnesses prefabrication to create affordable laneway suites that can be added to existing properties.
What is the potential of new models for practicing architecture? Two Montreal firms LAAB and Pivot are asking precisely this question. LAAB leans heavily on quantitative analysis, using UX modelling to ground services anchored in strategic design. Pivot, for its part, is one of a handful of architecture co-ops in Canada an egalitarian model that opposes the hierarchical structure of traditional architectural practices.
Cross-disciplinarity is in the DNA of another trio of firms. Nonument (Toronto) positions itself at the intersection of art and architecture, while Future Simple Studio (Montreal) embraces branding and object prototyping alongside residential and commercial interiors, and Oxbow (Regina and Saskatoon) describes architecture as a subset of landscape design.
The broader context whether a forested West Coast island, northern city, or southern metropolis is key to a set of practices that might be seen as addressing the concerns of critical regionalism. Laura Killam (Vancouver) is deeply attuned to her childhood landscapes along the Salish Sea, while s.no has set up a thriving practice in Whitehorse, and blanchette’s designs carry an intent to bring out the Nordic character of Montreal.
Three final firms take a cross-cultural approach to architecture. Odami (Toronto) is a partnership that blends and blurs ideas from one partner’s training in Europe with the other’s Canadian education. Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop (Vancouver) prides itself on a diverse staff comprised mostly of newcomers to Canada, who bring a vibrancy of ideas to the practice. And EHA (Vancouver) takes both a cross-cultural and crossgenerational view of design: they specialize in environments for community-based elder care, with several initial projects blending in elements from traditional Japanese homes to align with their clients’ background.
Any emerging practice spends some time getting its footing. And then, with some luck, it begins to be able to ask bigger questions: what is Canadian architecture now? And what might it become? In the pages ahead, you’ll find 20 distinct answers.
Twenty + Change: New Perspectives would not be possible without the financial assistance of our incredible sponsors. We are grateful to the following organizations for their generous support of this initiative.
PATRONS
SUPPORTERS
BENEFACTORS
Elsa Lam and Heather Dubbeldam
Alexandre Bernier
A third-generation Montrealer, Alexandre Bernier cites the city and its architecture as his most prominent influences. Guided by a sense of care and stewardship for the place he calls home, Bernier’s portfolio is anchored by residential projects that blend modern aesthetics with Montreal’s architectural heritage and are seamlessly integrated into the urban fabric.
Bernier studied environmental design at the Université de Québec à Montréal, whose program spans from the industrial design of objects to the planning of cities. After learning about Atelier Pierre Thibault’s Abbaye Val Notre Dame, Bernier recalls deciding he “wanted to do that wanted to do architecture.” After interning at Thibault’s studio in Quebec City, he went on to study architecture at the Université de Montréal. He also worked with architect Alain Carle before founding his eponymous practice in 2015. Thibault and Carle are part of a generation of Quebec archi-
tects who, says, Bernier, shaped a culture of architecture in Montreal.
Bernier is deeply invested in what he refers to as “the continuity of the city.” His design approach seeks to capitalize on what’s already working the architectural elements that have allowed the city and its buildings to thrive for hundreds of years. Bernier explains that he is “always thinking about why buildings have evolved in the ways that they have, and how we can continue this evolution.” Instead of dreaming of a blank slate from which to imagine designs freely, Bernier seeks to preserve the DNA of the city, guiding its evolution to meet the needs of modern life and ensure that it will survive for the next hundred years.
This position is fundamentally geared towards environmental sustainability. Taking a holistic approach, Bernier aims to create spaces that transcend the “trend” cycle and stand the test of time, and that have the flexibility to be easily transitioned as needs change.
ALEXANDRE BERNIER
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
While the aesthetic and functional qualities of the spaces that Bernier designs are meant to be timeless, he takes a decidedly different approach to material selection. The architect tends to choose simple, natural materials, accepting and designing with the changes to materials that happen over time. The resulting patina tells the story of a building, rooting it in both time and place.
Bernier’s designs are materializations of a commitment to caring for the city and its inhabitants. He insists that this care is not only manifest in the physicality of architecture, but pervades every aspect of his work: “It’s also how you listen to people, how you work with people, and how you set up your practice.”
Ushma Thakrar
1-2 Appartements RJM transformed an existing duplex near Mont-Royal Avenue into a trio of three-bedroom units. On the street side, a thirdstorey addition blends with neighbouring rooflines, while at back, the addition adopts the typical L-form of Montreal residences. 3 CaTHOUSE is the transformation of an 1885 duplex in Montreal’s St. Henri neighbourhood. Its copper cladding was developed with a local ornamental metalwork artisan. The resulting building will eventually age to a textured green. 4-5 La Crête Métallique adds to a tiny 52-square-metre house from 1885, with an interior that exposes and celebrates raw materials from the original construction.
Architecture écologique
The apparent simplicity of Étienne Lemay’s projects belies a long and circuitous professional trajectory. After training in graphic and interior design, he spent many years moving between Canada and work experiences abroad, in countries including France, Australia, and Kenya. When he appeared unannounced at Balkrishna (B.V.) Doshi’s office in Ahmedabad, India, he was invited to join a research project on materials and housing in informal settlements. While working with Marchese Partners in Australia, Lemay applied to study architecture at Dalhousie University. This led to many years working for Brian MacKay-Lyons they still collaborate today. Whereas in Doshi’s office, Lemay made the drawings because he couldn’t communicate with locals, in MacKay-Lyons’s office, he was handed a full project in Gatineau after only a year, because he was the only francophone. As a result, he quickly obtained his license.
Lemay’s early years of work focused on commercial interiors, but he became concerned with how much waste these projects produced perhaps seeding his later interest in building sustainably. As he turned from interiors to architecture, Lemay gravitated toward residential projects he likes the close client relationships and working at “a scale where you do everything.” Now a sole practitioner with one occasional employee, he revels in multitasking and isn’t looking to grow his office.
Architecture écologique’s projects are both “rough and refined,” says Lemay. This is the product of years of working in the Maritimes, as well as additional stints on the West Coast at Patkau Architects and in Quebec City at Atelier Pierre Thibault. A lineage of regionalist approaches to design comes across in how Lemay works with heritage buildings, and with the culture of built heritage.
ETIENNE LEMAY
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
In Quebec, construction culture differs from region to region. Lemay is continually both learning from and educating builders on sustainable techniques. For instance, he asks builders to leave screws in if they’ve put them in the wrong place, to avoid creating air gaps in the building envelope. Beyond Lemay’s focus on sustainable architecture he’s had Passive House accreditation since 2015 he values engagement with construction culture, since most of his projects are non-urban and embedded within natural landscapes. He will never raze a site and designs in ways that enable crews to tread lightly during the building process.
1 A house in Val-des-Lacs, Quebec, is anchored directly on the bedrock of a natural forest clearing, minimizing disturbances to the site.
2 Currently under construction, a three-seasons cabin near Revelstoke, BC, includes large covered exterior spaces. 3-5 Ferme des Coteaux, located on an old orchard in the lower St. Lawrence region, includes a residence and series of stables and barns. The design pairs exteriors inspired by traditional agricultural buildings with minimalist, carefully detailed interiors.
Claire Lubell
AtLRG Architecture
AtLRG’s founders are candid about their origin story: the Winnipegbased firm was born of a mid-life/mid-career reckoning with time. Colleagues and friends Chris Wiebe, Brian Pearson, and Sean Radford were all turning 40. They’d studied together at the University of Manitoba, and had worked for well over a decade in the profession. “Over the years, we had talked about maybe starting up a firm,” Wiebe muses. “There’s something about turning 40 that encourages you to ask: if not now, then when?”
The trio had amassed plenty of experience in sectors like multi-family housing and mixed use, and were sufficiently well known within Winnipeg’s compact design community that they were able to build a book of business quickly. While Winnipeg remains a sprawl-oriented city, the market for modest intensification/infill in older core areas, like the Exchange District, has provided AtLRG with appealing opportunities, such as the conversion of the upper floors of a 1970s office building on Main into residential units.
The house specialty is contending with trickier downtown sites. The firm quickly built a reputation for taking on difficult infill projects bringing a clear method and simplicity to the designs that made them viable.
A 10-storey Exchange district project, with 112,000 square feet of residential, retail, and office, as well as minimal underground parking, is a prime example of how AtLRG is advancing design that allows intensification while fitting into the historic character of the area. The typical tower-on-podium typology has been tweaked so that the base fits into the brick-and-beam form of the street. Meanwhile, the tower is configured as a parallelogram, oriented away from the street grid to address the Red River.
AtLRG had to work through the City’s regulations around conservation and density. “It was a very economically challenged project because of all these constraints,” says Wiebe. “I think we ended up with a design that is respectful to the heritage component of the context, but that also delivered the necessary tower that pays for the podium.” (The project, by Alston Properties and Concord Projects, is expected to open next year.)
AtLRG has also set its sights on winning more public sector commissions, and is currently working on an addition to the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture building.
John Lorinc
CHRIS BURKE, PAMELA KRAVETSKY, JULIEN COMBOT, SEAN RADFORD, BRANDON BUNKOWSKY, DIRK BLOUW, JOEL FRIESEN, MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH, BRIAN PEARSON, DANIELLE SNEESBY, JANINE KROPLA, CHRIS WIEBE, ROXY [DOG]
WINNIPEG, MANITOBA
1, 3-4 703 St. Anne’s parallelogram shape responds to its location—a long-vacant parcel whose corner is cut diagonally by a meandering creek.
2 NK Flats is a 29-suite apartment block on a landlocked site in Winnipeg’s North Kildonan neighbourhood. It shares a green space with a high-rise neighbour to one side, and is realized at a scale sensitive to the single-family housing on the opposite side. 5-6 Currently under construction, Moment is a 11,000-square-metre, 11-storey mixed-use development sandwiched between two heritage structures in Winnipeg’s historic Exchange District. The podium responds to the historic streetscape, while the tower portion is set back and angled to address the Red River.
blanchette archi.design
MICHAËL HÉTU, MARC-ANDRÉ DUBUC, MAXIME LALIBERTÉ, BOBBY CADORETTE, PATRICK BLANCHETTE, ROMAN ZUBCO, ALEXIS MALTAIS, KEVIN LAVIGNE, LAURENCE DUBREUIL, ALEXANDRE HARTON, GABRIELLE LÉVESQUE, PIERRICK JULIENNE, AUDREY SAUVÉ, FRANÇOIS BAIL L’HEUREUX, JOACHIM BADAOUI-AUBRY, DAVID D. BOISSEAU, LAURINE PIERREFICHE, SARAH ARSENAULT, JEAN-PHILIPPE FAHEY-PONTBRIAND
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
It is the in-between spaces that are the most compelling to Montrealbased practice blanchette archi.design. “Third places” the cafés, libraries, parks, and other hangouts that exist between home and work are the ones that Patrick Blanchette, the firm’s principal, believes “create a place’s culture.” Blanchette thinks there is still work to be done in Quebec “to deeply explore how to create a well-constructed Nordic place.” It is precisely this work that he sought to take on when he started blanchette in 2018.
Blanchette knew from the outset that he wanted to design spaces that would amplify the province’s northern character. He was particularly inspired by his hometown, Fermont, but also by his visits to Scandinavia, where he observed the possibilities of architecture to elevate the culture of a place. Seeing how the design of Northern European buildings brought people together outside of their homes even during the
harshest of winter days underscored the importance of creating unprogrammed, publicly accessible spaces that allow residents the opportunity to connect on their own terms.
Blanchette understands architecture and design as “setting the stage for social interactions.” His firm approaches all of its work, regardless of program or scale, as having the potential to actively shape people’s lives and the collective life of cities. The rebranding of the practice in 2022 from “architecture” to “archi.design” formally recognizes its multi-disciplinary approach and expertise, which includes furniture, interiors, architecture, landscape, and urban design. Many of their projects begin, says Blanchette, by thinking about the qualities that would create “the appropriate backdrop for the local culture,” as it manifests in all scales of design.
One of the projects that most clearly demonstrates the firm’s commitment to creating “third places” is Le Petit Laurier. Here, blanchette
archi.design marries a streets-in-the-sky model with courtyard housing. The result is a hybrid type that integrates (and maximizes) indoor and outdoor spaces for residents to encounter their neighbours and build community. As with all the practice’s work, building physical infrastructure is understood as an opportunity to create the social infrastructure that allows local cultures to flourish.
Blanchette summarizes his approach to architecture in three questions: “How can we make it better? How can we make it sustainable? And how can we make it local?” Together, these three questions guide a process that Blanchette hopes will generate designs that are “a true reflection of a place.”
-Ushma Thakrar
1,2 The fit-out of a former carpet factory for Vention, a specialist in manufacturing automation, involved creating a central pavilion as a collaborative hub. Meccano-like columns nod to the elements of robotic production lines, and a monumental arch reinvents two existing mechanical shafts as a focal point. 3,4 The 31-unit Le Petit Laurier includes a continuous exterior walkway, which rings a communal courtyard for residents. The site’s natural slope allows for a threestorey volume on the street side and a four-storey volume on the alley side, and facilitates the inclusion of units for people with reduced mobility. 5,6 An office for landscape designers Projet Paysage plays with natural light and transparency. On the floor, a bright yellow line demarcates between public and private space, and adds a splash of colour.
BoON Architecture
BoON Architecture began as a residential studio in 2016. According to associate Jean-Nicolas Bouchard, who joined in 2021, this still informs the way the team approaches the now larger and more complex projects they take on: they listen, they work together, and they take action (“l’écoute, la collaboration, l’action”). As a young firm, they welcome working within constraints to realize big ideas for small budgets, but they’ve also established themselves enough that prospective clients are already on-board with their eco-design ethos.
Environmentally sustainable architecture is at the core of BoON Architecture’s mission. The team works to consciously mitigate risks like toxicity, flooding, and forest fire damage, and to reduce the ecological impact of their projects. Of BoON’s sixteen studio members, four have LEED credentials, four have Passive House certification, and four more have completed Passive House training; the studio as a whole is B Corp certified. Bouchard explains that their focus goes beyond energy models and carbon calculations, by considering the inherently social dimension of the environment embracing a contextual, holistic, and multi-scalar approach. Their design method is, as he puts it, one of “empirical creativity.”
Part of this is embracing a scientific approach observe, analyze, hypothesize, test, iterate to deliver a better result within budget. The BoON team is careful to quantify the added value of quality details and ecological strategies. Bouchard is confident that as more rigorous sustainability requirements become part of planning regulations, “BoON will be ready.” He says that tools such as upfront carbon analysis allow the firm’s architects to think empirically, while also freeing them to focus on the cultural role of projects, and to more clearly see opportunities for fun and beauty in their designs.
As B o ON Architecture grows its portfolio, it’s taking on work in a wider range of sectors and building up toward public contracts. It currently has projects under development across Quebec in recreational tourism, public space, and artisanal food production.
Claire Lubell
1,2 Named La Cime—french for “the treetop”—this 20-square-metre A-frame refuge echoes the form of neighbouring evergreens. Built to accommodate four guests, the second floor includes nest-like bed alcoves with sweeping mountain views. 3, 5, 6 A multi-use wood-frame building in Montmagny, Quebec, includes a private courtyard designed to optimize daylight and natural ventilation for residents. A ground-level commercial space addresses the main throughfare, and parking is tucked under the back volume. 4, 7 Le Jardin d’Hiver is a demountable vault that is seasonally deployed in the courtyard of a popular Quebec City bar.
PHILIPPE LABBÉE, MARILYN LEMIEUX-JOLIN, ARIANE MOREAU, JEANNE PELLETIER, ROSE DEMERS, JULIE BRADETTE, ANN-FRÉDÉRIC BROCHET, JEAN-NICOLAS BOUCHARD, GABRIEL FAGGION, SARAH-LOU GAGNON-VILLENEUVE, BRUNO VERGE, VICTORIA DESLANDES-LYON
QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC
COMN Architects
The founders of COMN aimed to make a splash when they set up their firm, choosing as their inaugural project a multiplex they developed for themselves. The so-called “Semi-Semi” occupies a tight 16-by-78-foot corner lot in Toronto’s east end. Instead of a detached home, Clarissa Nam and Peter McNeil designed two back-to-back units of 1,000-squarefeet each, one of which was to become their own home. Both of the splitlevel units are massed vertically, allowing each to have its own street-facing entrance. The exterior is a geometrical composition of white stucco over vertical black wood siding, with a middle section in grey concrete panels. Generous windows and perforated aluminum screens allow in natural light. The mirror-image living spaces are situated at opposite ends to allow for acoustic separation.
“We used Semi-Semi as a jumping off point, to get the house published and get our name out there,” says McNeil. He had worked previously for Toronto architect and multi-family developer George Popper, and the couple had an interest in pursuing infill residential projects a fast-growing market, given Toronto City Council’s move to allow multiplexes and small apartment buildings in many areas previously reserved for detached residential.
One such project is an infill site across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario, currently a large vacant lot behind an existing nineunit walk-up apartment. Instead of shoe-horning a stand-alone midrise onto the site, Nam and McNeil designed an extension to the walk-up that will include 12 rental units, varying in size from one to three bedrooms. “We thrive under constraints,” McNeil says of the tight lot. Adds Nam: “It focuses us to try to maximize what we have, but at the same time, obviously, to make it as aesthetically pleasing as it can be.”
That approach characterized the conditions on the lot they had purchased for their own home. “You’re forced to really engage with the context,” Nam adds. In general, that outlook also describes their practice, which is defined more by pragmatism than by a consistent aesthetic. And like other smaller, newer, firms, they’ve learned quickly to be mindful of their clients’ resources: “Every project is going to be different,” she observes. “We work under any budget and focus on the experience of each space.”
John Lorinc
CLARISSA NAM, PETER MCNEIL, JONAS CHIN, NATALIE KOPP TORONTO, ONTARIO
1-4 COMN’s first built work, Semi Semi, consists of two 1,000-squarefoot semi-detached homes nestled onto a site near Toronto’s Greektown. One serves as the firm’s residence and studio, and the other is used for long-term rental accommodation. 5 Grange Place is a 12-unit residential building situated on a vacant lot behind an existing 1930s walk-up apartment building. Residents access their homes from a landscaped pedestrian mews, which buffers the entrances from the laneway and provides the suites with direct sunlight.
EHA
The pandemic brought elders’ housing into sharp focus for many of us for the first time. But architect Eitaro Hirota had long been working on reshaping the elder-care landscape in British Columbia, one project at a time. By considering the full scope of changing spatial needs that people may have as they age, the practice aims to incrementally renovate and futureproof both buildings and cities.
Hirota explains that as an early-career architect, he was drawn to the complexities of elder care after seeing the institutional options available for his ill father. He gradually retrofitted a space in his own house to serve as a “makeshift care home.” In the decade since, Hirota has been on an active learning journey, honing his skills in designing improved seniors’ care facilities, researching how architecture can better serve aging populations, and seeking precedents for creating community resiliency in the face of changing demographics.
One of EHA’s earliest projects is the Homecoming Memory Village, a dementia village designed for a community just outside of Richmond, Virginia. Following the principles of this relatively new architectural type, the project is a microcosm of a city, giving its residents independ-
ence and the ability to participate in everyday life within its boundaries. Creating regular access to the everyday through creating destinations that the residents can step outside and go to promotes independence and purpose, as well as natural social interactions with neighbours. This has been a central tenet of EHA’s elder-care projects. Other seniors’ housing projects, such as Seton Villa and Rosewood, blur the lines between carer and cared-for, creating a co-living environment designed to integrate elders’ care to housing and the everyday life within the city. The boundaries of these institutional spaces are softened to bring in a broader public, while giving residents freedom of movement and allowing them to be visibly active members of their communities.
EHA’s practice also extends to projects that allow seniors to age in place, such as the Rinkyo Laneway House. Hirota explains that the word “rinkyo” means “living next door” in Japanese, and that the project has allowed EHA’s client to age nearly in place. EHA was initially approached to create an accessory dwelling unit for the clients’ daughter and young family to move into, and to retrofit the main house to allow the client to age in place: Hirota instead proposed the opposite arrangement.
EITARO HIROTA, CAIO MARTINHO, VERONIKA ZARUBOVA, JS DOMITSU VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
EHA created an accessible ADU for the elderly client, and made space for the client’s daughter and her young family to move into the main house. The result is multi-generational housing that addresses changing cognitive and physical needs, while also providing familial support and a sense of independence for both households. Hirota notes that working on projects that allow for aging in place (or nearly in place), as well as simultaneously building larger-scale assisted-living facilities, though seemingly opposing strategies, are both fundamental to expanding the number of options available to people as they age.
Hirota says that part of the reason that we are in the current crisis in elder care is that “aging has long been invisible and individual in Canada.” He sees architecture as having the ability to “make aging visible.” In doing so, architecture can normalize aging, and allow people to envision their elders and themselves in supportive environments that integrate naturally into their communities and everyday lives.
Ushma Thakrar
1 A 48-unit seniors supportive housing building adds to the existing Seton Villa campus in Burnaby, BC. As part of the design, a new garden amenity building provides a destination for residents to take part in activities and share a coffee or meal with friends, while enjoying views of the gardens and North Shore mountains. 2-3 The Rinkyo Laneway House for an aging parent includes six one-room volumes, strategically shifted to create spaces for gardens and patios. 4-5 Rosewood is a purpose-built co-living facility for Japanese senior care. The 10-bed facility integrates assisted living into a residential environment that encourages engagement in daily activities including cooking, laundry, and gardening.
Future Simple Studio
Pinning down precisely what type of projects Future Simple Studio does is difficult. The team makes architecture, of course, but it also has expertise in object design and branding. Founder and principal architect Christine Djerrahian says that she and her team are excited about taking on a wide-ranging scope of design work.
The aesthetic of the studio’s residential and commercial interior work embraces dark-toned materials. One might mistake these for minimal, sombre, or austere spaces, but for Djerrahian, the material palette makes them “warm, cozy, calm, and intimate.” In contrast, the studio’s branding and communications projects are bright and powerful, with a hint of playfulness. Regardless of the type of work, Future Simple Studio can “dream up a universe, and then communicate it digitally and physically,” says Djerrahian.
For several years, Future Simple has been working with Northcrest Developments and the Canada Lands Company on the id8 Downsview project. Djerrahian was brought in as an architectural advisor because of her experience managing large-scale projects during her time in New York; quickly, the team also ended up developing the website, social media campaigns and other tools to increase public engagement in the planning process during the Covid-19 pandemic. The work helped
create a feedback loop, especially with young people, that has informed the way the development is taking shape.
Just six years after the company’s founding, it boasts a well-rounded team equipped to tackle everything from strategy development to photoshoots, and from housing design to object prototyping. Each studio member has a different background that they bring to the table, allowing everyone to have a hand in a project, and to jump in with their expertise at various phases.
Djerrahian founded the studio and was joined by partner Ernst van ter Beek, who specializes in product design, and they have been very conscious about the work environment they’ve created. Over her years of practice in other firms, Djerrahian became aware of “a lot of energy spent on insecurity,” and so she wanted to make Future Simple Studio a place of trust. This carries through to the way they work with clients. Djerrahian says they avoid being proprietary about their ideas, often presenting clients with preliminary work that they’re excited to get feedback on. They aim to “meet clients where they’re at” through storytelling what they call an “anti-TADA!” approach.
Claire Lubell
ERNST VAN TER BEEK, CHRISTINE DJERRAHIAN
MONTREAL, QUEBEC
1-2 The design of SushiBox, a restaurant in Quebec City, includes textured surfaces that connect distant traditions with local craft. 3 A loft in the Old Port of Montreal includes two bespoke wood and glass boxes that contain the bedrooms and play areas. Kitchen, living, dining, study, reading, and exercise areas are on their periphery, in a fluid open plan. 4 As part of the id8 Downsview Project, Future Simple Studio is helping with public communications for the process of redesigning 520 acres of land. 5 The design for a Quebec City restaurant uses peachy hues and raw textures to evoke a natural environment.
LAAB architecture
Michel Lauzon founded LAAB just four years ago, but he did so with the knowledge of many years in practice. What made a lasting impression were the experiences and feedback of clients who often perceived architectural design as a haphazard, intuitive, and somewhat opaque process. This left them feeling insecure about capturing the full potential of their projects.
With LAAB , Lauzon set out to “demystify” design: making it clearer, more precise, and more participatory for clients. For him, design excellence is much more than a product of an architectural style or signature. Rather, it emerges from a diligent creative process of feasibility studies, applied research, and strategic thinking. He encourages his team not to “jump too quickly into design solutions.” This means that each project requires its own timeline to mature, steadily laying the strategic groundwork upstream. Once green-lighted, there is less risk, less stop-and-go, and less design rethinking in later stages.
Lauzon sees LAAB ’s evidence-based approach as akin to urban design, in that it aims to consider as many parameters and competing interests as possible. Key to this is quantitative analysis. By using UX modelling, the studio begins by producing and working with data, which Lauzon says makes it easier for their clients to engage in the strategic design process. For example, LAAB might model the entrance of a museum to gauge the fluidity of the space with existing and projected visitor numbers. In this case, a well-designed space would “take away the need for wayfinding.”
In the case of the new Terrebonne Campus of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), the developer asked LAAB to conduct a UX study of transit options and user occupation throughout the day. The aim was to test whether the number of parking spaces could be drastically reduced, making for a more compact and environmentally sustainable solution.
MICHEL LAUZON, FRÉDÉRIC GAGLIOLO, NEIL MELENDEZ, MAXWELL STERRY, NOLWENN KEROMNES, ANTHONY CORRIVEAU, DAPHNÉ BEAUDRY, GINO MAURI MONTREAL, QUEBEC
Offering strategic design and UX studies as a distinct service has, according to Lauzon, allowed LAAB to be more versatile within an architecture market that’s less open than it used to be, with fewer design-based competitions in Quebec and narrower selection processes. The firm has blossomed since 2020, attracting a roster of A-list clients and an array of ambitious public and private commissions.
Lauzon says that launching the firm during the Covid-19 pandemic has ensured that agility and adaptability were ingrained into the team’s DNA from the get-go. Building on these capabilities, he is less concerned with building a portfolio in specific typologies or establishing a particular aesthetic than in ensuring his practice remains focused on delivering innovative and relevant design solutions in an ever-evolving architectural landscape.
1-2 The flagship physical location for a born-digital furniture start-up, Cozey’s storefront design started with UX and branding research. The result is a next-generation store with no onsite storage and no cash registers. 3-4 To attract its Montreal employees back to in-person work, ad agency Cossette opened a office that draws insights from UX design to be shaped around the staff experience, rather than from a management perspective. 5-6 As an alternative to the standard temporary summer installations made of two-by-fours, Agora Maximus offers the type of modular, integrated, vegetated elements usually associated with permanent street furnishings.
Claire Lubell
Laura Killam Architecture
Laura Killam’s design studio emerged in a deeply personal and serendipitous way when she returned home to the British Columbia coast, after stints in Los Angeles and Montreal, to raise her family. When she started building seasonal homes along the Salish Sea, the first six were for members of the community she grew up within, on an island in Desolation Sound. This allowed her to establish an approach to designing and building for wild, remote sites. Her clients trusted her to create living spaces that would enrich and be enriched by their settings. As she puts it, “the building plays second to the natural environment.”
Killam begins by carefully reading a site. She returns often as often as deadlines and budget will allow, but certainly every couple of months to spend time studying the terrain, the views, the sun, and the wind. For one thing, the right building site has to be found before design begins. Killam is rarely working in a context where property boundaries, zoning, or setbacks are at play, so natural criteria determine siting, while other constraints are discovered through the process.
Designing for seasonal living allows Killam to guide her clients to build less and think in terms of efficiency minimizing their footprint, going light on heating needs, and so on. Practicality also guides her material choices. While the wood panelling that finishes most of her interior walls
is an undeniably aesthetic choice, it is also a pragmatic one: in a house left unheated all winter, drywall is riskier, because it doesn’t breathe as well.
Killam’s designs are also shaped by working on sites that don’t necessarily have truck access for construction, with materials and crews coming in by barge or helicopter. Through this lens, designing with interior wood panelling means that the work can be done by the same finish carpenters who are already on site. Over the years, Killam has come to collaborate closely with a craftsman and fourth-generation Cortes Island resident as her primary builder. This relationship allows her to use architectural drawings to communicate intent and start a conversation with him, rather than to resolve all the details.
Beyond pragmatic thinking, designing for seasonal living is an opportunity to think more flexibly about space, and to move as many functions as possible outside a home’s walls. For Killam, this is where moments of bliss are created. She often reserves the best spot in the project for an outdoor shower. The most important aspects of her work, says Killam, are providing pleasure and helping families plan houses that can grow with them over generations.
Claire Lubell
LAURA KILLAM
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
1-3
Located on an off-grid Salish Sea island, Ranch Outpost includes generous outdoor living spaces that blur the line between interior and exterior. The interiors for the project were designed in collaboration with Sophie Burke Design. 4-6 The Forest Canopy Cabin is a three-season dwelling that harnesses the dynamic play of sunlight and shadow passing through the forest canopy.
Leckie Studio Architecture + Design
For Michael Leckie, “design is speculation and architects are speculators.” Leckie and his team focus on bringing optimism and hopefulness into creating their visions for spaces. This comes with a respect for the privilege of designing, which requires “mobilizing considerable resources for both ideation and realization.”
This sense of optimism led Leckie to found his eponymous firm at the mid-career age of 41. The advantage, he says, is that he had enough experience to start his practice with a clear sense of identity: he wanted to pursue a design approach based on rigour and subtraction. Leckie sees his work as embodying “an essentialist approach to a brief” rather than being focused on authorship. He insists with clients that design briefs are hyper clear, because “clarity lends itself to better collaboration.”
Now, almost 10 years later, with a team of nearly twenty, Leckie chuckles at the word “emerging,” wondering if being emergent ultimately comes down to being clear about what projects to turn down. He judges opportunities in terms of how they fit into a longer arc of work, rather than by their scale or typology.
One thread of this arc is an aesthetic one: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design projects have minimalist details, neutral tones and textures, and a somewhat sombre atmospheric effect. While the aesthetic is clearly contemporary, Leckie points to the Shaker movement and Canadiana camps and cabins as stylistic influences. This comes across most evidently in the private residential projects that represent a large portion of the studio’s work. Take, for instance, the Camera House in Pemberton Valley, the JRV house in Vancouver, or the in-progress OHR house on Hornby Island: despite very different massing and materials, their spaces are simple, yet warm, and always include framed views of nature.
A second, less evident thread lies in Leckie’s interest in prototyping. “It’s hard not to look at every project as a prototype,” he says. Rather than thinking of a project as singular and self-contained, he sees it as “a particular instance within a set of conditions” and asks himself: “What would the solution mean for a community, or a city, or the planet?”
This has led, on the one hand, to entrepreneurial ventures in prefabrication: The Backcountry Hut Company produces sustainable kitof-parts cabins, while TripTych proposes urban housing that is adaptable over time, evolving with owners (think multi-generational living) to promote gentle densification. On the other hand, the firm is also taking on housing projects like the Winthorpe & Valentine prototype and the recent Broadway & Alma, both part of the City of Vancouver’s Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Program. Leckie Studio Architecture + Design also recently worked with the British Columbia Ministry of Housing to produce ten typological designs for their Standardized Housing Design Project part of a catalogue of designs made available to the public free of charge.
Claire Lubell
MELODY CHEN, DAVID GREGORY, KELSEY WILKINSON, ALDO BUITRAGO, KATE READ, CAMERON KOROLUK, VICTOR FIRSOV, HOLDEN KORBIN, IAN LEE, IRENA JENEI, JAMES EIDSE, EMILY DOVBNIAK, DENON VIPOND, JOHNATHAN LUM, CHARLOTTE KENNEDY, ALASTAIR BIRD, ASHLEY HANNON, MICHAEL LECKIE
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
1-2 Located in Vancouver, Full House is an adaptable prototype for multi-generational living. A main floor steel-plate pivot door allows for configurations as a five-bedroom home, or two discrete dwelling units.
3-4 The Backcountry Hut Company offers a prefabricated cabin system that is easily scaleable and customizable to meet a wide range of needs. The architects have worked closely with their fabrication partners on Backcountry Hut projects across North America. 5-6 TripTych is a housing prototype for adaptable densification. The design consists of 75-square-metre modules that can be combined and reconfigured in a variety of ways over the lifespan of a building.
Mindful Architecture
In 2006, when Geneviève Noël saw T. Maginnis Cocivera’s competition-winning M.Arch thesis on sewage biofiltration, it was a meeting of environmentally aligned minds.
Raised in Quebec’s trees-and-skis Eastern Townships, Noël grew up knowing that she was Québécoise with some Indigenous ancestry, with the latter largely assimilated into the former. She left a life as a clothing designer to travel the globe and plant over a million trees on the coast of British Columbia prior to studying industrial design at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University. She has patented two living wall systems. One of them, licensed worldwide to Sempergreen BV, is Cradle to Cradle certified and has been installed at the 9/11 memorial in New York City.
Cocivera, who grew up near Guelph, Ontario, completed his architectural studies at Dalhousie University and worked with Mario Bellini in Milan on the Louvre Hall of Islamic Arts and with Busby Perkins & Will in Vancouver on the UBC Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, before transitioning into residential development, culminating as VP Development at Polygon Homes.
Cocivera and Noël founded Mindful Architecture in 2017, more than a decade after becoming life partners. Their work addresses the
climate crisis though regenerative design approaches that are rooted in Indigenous principles such as circularity and living in harmony with the natural world. “When Truth and Reconciliation came about, I felt compelled to reconnect with my Indigenous roots, cultivating friendships and learning more about Indigenous Culture,” says Noël. (Mindful Architecture, as they note, is located on Squamish and TsleilWaututh unceded territory, in the place commonly known as North Vancouver.) Since then, Cocivera and Noël have co-created with First Nations and Métis communities. “We start by listening and learning about community-specific traditional forms, what kinds of tectonic systems they use, and we showcase the sophistication of these building strategies in a contemporary way,” says Cocivera.
Weaving two circular forms into an infinity loop, the Métis Cultural Centre, an in-progress project in Fort McMurray, Alberta, was designed to be regenerative and Zero Carbon. Symbolizing Métis culture, the project conjoins a classically European open-air amphitheatre and an enclosed volume encircling a ceremonial Fire Circle. A ramp spirals up to a rooftop terrace shaded by a deciduous Dream Catcher trellis. The double-height volume’s glazed south wall and operable skylight
GENEVIÈVE NOEL, T. MAGINNIS COCIVERA NORTH VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
induce stack-effect ventilation, while earth tubes temper the ventilation air and plants cascading down the atrium railings naturally humidify the interior, saving up to 11 percent of the energy demand.
Using 21st-century technology to translate time-honoured Indigenous design principles into architecture is their approach to providing culturally resonant housing that is both contemporary and affordable. An Ishken, or pit house, is a traditional circular dwelling, nestled under insulating sod, with a central hearth. Several Indigenous communities have expressed interest in partnering on a pilot construction of Mindful Architecture’s 3D Printed Solar Pit House. The printing technology eliminates the cost premiums of building circular forms via conventional construction methods. What’s more, DCarb, the substance Mindful Architecture has pioneered as the printing material, dramatically shrinks the carbon footprint associated with concrete by replacing its usual CO2-intensive aggregates with crushed, carbon-sequestering seashells.
Both partners’ passion for turning one system’s waste into the ‘food’ for another process is generating intriguing possibilities for greener construction. Their research suggests that keratin fibre also known as hair washed and sterilized after it’s snipped off human heads, is a highly
effective building insulation material. “It’s resilient to moisture, it doesn’t need any chemicals added to it to pass the fire test for insulation, it sequesters 9 percent more carbon than cellulose insulation, and unlike wool, it is rapidly renewable worldwide and doesn’t need arable land nor water to be grown,” says Noël. The first installation of DCarb Insulation, Mindful Architecture’s hair-based insulation product, will take place next year, when Noël and Cocivera renovate and expand their home office.
Pamela Young
1-3 Currently under construction, the Métis Cultural Centre in Fort McMurray marks the land with the Métis infinity symbol. The loop joins two large courtyards, which respectively house an outdoor amphitheatre and an enclosed ceremonial Fire Circle. On the roof, a terrace is shaded by a Dream Catcher-inspired trellis, and visitors enjoy views of the Athabasca River and Moccasin Flats. 4-5 Taking cues from the traditional earth-sheltered Ishken, the prototype 3D-printed Solar Pit House offers a rapidly replicable, energy efficient, culturally resonant model for Indigenous housing.
Nonument
“What do you feel is unique about your practice or process?” this year’s Twenty + Change entry form asked. “Every project, no matter its size or context, is a venture aimed at either confronting fundamental challenges or fostering experimentation,” Nonument founder Dom Cheng responded.
For Cheng, gaining extensive experience at leading design firms was the run-up to that leap into investigation and experimentation. His 2005 entry in the University of Toronto’s portfolio competition for M. Arch students landed him an internship at the Southern California firm Morphosis, just before its founder, Thom Mayne, won the Pritzker. At Morphosis, Cheng worked on major projects in Paris, Shanghai and Madrid. After completing his master’s degree, he worked for 12 years at Toronto’s Hariri Pontarini Architects, becoming an associate and project managing multiple luxury high-rise projects.
“The plan the dream was always to start my own thing,” he says. Shortly after turning 40, he did. In 2020 he founded Nonument, a firm whose name speaks to his interest in process and adaptation, as well as his indifference to architectural striving after permanence. He’s now a solo practitioner with a handful of go-to collaborators. “I’m proud of the work to date, and I like the pace of it,” he says. “I’m doing one
or two projects a year, and I think that’s the way it should be if you want to craft a certain type of architecture with a certain type of quality.”
Cheng defines himself as an artist/architect; Nonument’s inaugural project presented ample opportunity for push and pull between the disciplines that are, to him, inseparable. Originally a Victorian-era storage and distribution facility for ice blocks, Ice House is now a flexible home for a family of four. Working with the existing interior palette of wood and concrete, Cheng introduced a few strategic focal points. Chunky, cog-like white oak wedges slot into an unobtrusive black stringer, forming a feature stair that appears to float against the black Venetian plaster wall behind it. For his architect-client, who is a textile hobbyist and textile collector, Cheng upcycled a drop cloth used during the renovation, turning it into the canvas for an artwork that he painted and draped over a barn door salvaged from the original building. He also opted for felt curtains in place of some solid walls a move that “gives the house this capacity to open and close up.”
Cheng’s next major project was a makeover of another nondescript Toronto building, this one dating from the mid-1980s. It had already served as a garment factory and a rehearsal studio, before becoming
DOM CHENG
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Radke Film Group’s headquarters. Radke is an umbrella organization comprising media production companies with many different specialties. “They share the building and there had to be very clear divisions on the interior, but on the exterior, they want to appear as a unity,” says Cheng. He overclad the three-storey masonry building in micro-cement, an uncommon choice for exterior applications in North America, despite its combination of low-maintenance durability with a subtle, plaster-like irregularity.
Within and without, Radke Films embodies quiet confidence, unity in variety, and attention to detail. Cheng points out that integrating two-inch horizontal reveal joint lines with one-inch vertical ones in the micro-cement gently accentuates the building’s horizontality. “I want every move that we make in architecture to have purpose, and a reason for being somewhere,” he says. Experimentation often kick-starts his design process, but the end results are never random.
1 An office for
2-3 The residential renovation of a former ice storage depot in Toronto highlights the building’s material past. 4-5 The Radke Film Group commissioned Nonument to transform an underused music rehearsal studio into a commercial workplace for its various companies. The dynamic workplace includes a spectrum of environments, from soundproof booths to communal lounges.
Pamela Young
Steam Films (part of the Radke Film Group) is anchored by a gallery kitchen and storage wall, crafted from solid white oak.
Odami
If it’s not one thing, it’s another–or better yet, a bit of both. Aránzazu González Bernardo, who is from Spain, and Michael Fohring, a Canadian, met when they were both working at an architectural practice in Austria. The couple, who founded Toronto-based Odami in 2017, describe themselves as two very stubborn people with very different architectural educations. Fohring says his studies at McGill University were looser and more theory-driven, while Bernardo trained in a country that places considerable emphasis on construction viability and working with the existing urban fabric. “On any of our projects, there is a lot of head-butting, but we always find our way to a place where he’s happy and I’m happy,” Bernardo says. Their interest in blending and blurring extends well beyond in-house cultural cross-fertilization. “We like to talk about helping a project emerge from all the conditions the quirky characteristics of the client or the site, or the research that we do about its history,” says Fohring. “We’re trying to tease these elements out and allow them to emerge more naturally through these conditions, as opposed to coming in with our own set of ideas and our identity that we need to preserve on each project.”
Deer Park House illustrates their affinity for renovations and additions that are, as Fohring says, “a continuum rather than a hard break.” To expand and renew this century home in Toronto, Odami designed a third-floor addition that takes its massing cues from neighbouring residences. On the interior, they struck a balance between opening up spaces and preserving a suite of distinct rooms, each with its own character. This approach reduced construction waste, while ensuring that the changes read like the next chapter in the house’s history, rather than a completely different story. Large and clearly new, a fluted marble fireplace comfortably co-exists with retained elements such as a leaded-glass transom, still set in a previously exterior doorway that is now inboard.
Odami has now designed two stores for Australian luxury skincare and fragrance retailer Aesop: one in Toronto’s Yorkville district and one in Pacific Palisades, California. The California shop riffs on the lush greenness of its surroundings and the serene, nature-attuned architecture of the Kappe Residence, the Pacific Palisades home of SCI-Arch founder Ray Kappe. Aesop Yorkville draws inspiration from how that part of Toronto retained its Victorian architecture and intimate scale
MICHAEL FOHRING, ARÁNZAZU GONZÁLEZ BERNARDO TORONTO, ONTARIO
throughout the mid-century modern decades, when many heritage neighbourhoods were obliterated. While the store’s high, narrow dimensions and deep burgundy walls feel very Victorian, the most Odami thing about the project is its wainscoting. After a typical amount of head-butting, Bernardo and Fohring agreed that conventional old-timey porch or stairway spindles, unconventionally spaced, could set up an intriguing interplay between the nostalgic and the unfamiliar. Happening upon a supplier who wanted to unload a quantity of spindles cut too short for current code requirements sealed the conceptual deal. “Almost like thrifting!” Bernardo says, beaming.
A word about the word Odami: it’s not a real word. Not wanting to name their practice after themselves, the partners combined some random sounds they liked and arrived at a not-yet-registered domain name. Whether they’re manipulating syllables or spindles, they rely on iteration and instinct to get to where they both want to be.
Pamela Young
1,6 Odami approached Deer Park House, a renovation and addition to a Toronto house, with sensitivity to the history and architectural character of the existing century-old home. 2,4 Aesop’s Yorkville store pays homage to the area’s original Victorian homes with wainscoting made of traditional wooden spindles, painted in a rich burgundy tone.
3 The Palisades Village, Los Angeles, location of Aesop is inspired by the local vernacular, with buildings delicately perched within a cascading landscape of lush ridges and valleys. 5 A generous wood-lined skylight at Clanton House pours natural light through the core of the four-level Toronto home.
Oxbow Architecture
When Jim Siemens and Anna Ringstrom struck out on their own, the duo, who are partners in life and work, chose a firm name that reflected a worldview that prioritizes landscape the term “oxbow” describes the lakes that form along meandering prairie rivers as they shift.
Siemens often describes architecture as simply “a subset” of landscape architecture, Ringstrom’s discipline. “I think sometimes we, as architects, think of architecture as something grander,” he notes.
The name also refers to the way they aim to practice: “It was a beautiful analogy for the type of design process that we were interested in pursuing one which didn’t see the end from the beginning, and wasn’t a straight line, necessarily, but followed the course it needed to follow, to arrive at solutions that are a result of a project’s inherent logic.”
Oxbow Architecture is now a twelve-person practice. Various members are actively involved in architectural education Saskatchewan doesn’t have a university program, so they participate through sessional engagements and guest design reviews across the country. The ideas generated though their academic work have filtered into Oxbow’s small-scale interventions and work alongside First Nations and underserved communities across Saskatchewan.
One such project is the Muscowpetung Powwow Arbour, a 17,000square-foot cultural venue for the Saulteaux Nation currently under construction, designed in collaboration with Dalhousie University pro-
fessor emeritus Richard Kroeker and Wolfrom Engineering. “It is really a poetically beautiful structural and architectural resolution of a large round roof,” says Siemens, noting that the enclosure is a tensegrity structure that uses round timbers. “The structural proposition could only be realized formally as a circle a symbolically important geometry for the culture the building is meant to celebrate,” adds Brad Pickard, the building’s project architect.
The practice has always prioritized the human experience as a way of driving innovation. Avenue P Medical Office Building in Saskatoon, one of Oxbow’s first projects, faced the challenges of a deep building footprint, set by the requirements of an underground parking garage. In response, the architects strategically opened up the centre of the building as a skylit atrium covering over the width of the required parking, bringing daylight deep into the interior common spaces. The project also involved re-conceiving doctor’s suites with separate exam areas and administrative offices on different floors. This yielded a more efficient use of space, reduced overhead, and improvements for patients.
“The design of the building and the overall user experience aims to be one of openness, clarity and simplicity,” says project architect Sam Lock.
John Lorinc
ANDREA CLAYTON, ANNA RINGSTROM, ASHLEY GRAF, BRAD PICKARD, JIM SIEMENS, JORDYN LOY, MASON LOY, MEGAN FLORIZONE, MEGHAN TAYLOR, RORY PICKLYK, SAM LOCK, SARAH ROBERTSON
SASKATOON AND REGINA, SASKATCHEWAN
1-3 The Avenue P Medical Office Building in Saskatoon strives to provide a user experience that is as light and uplifting as possible, through the use of abundant daylight, generous communal spaces, and clear wayfinding. The clinic spaces adjoin a large skylit atrium, and medical specialists share offices and administrative spaces on a separate level. 4-6 Designed in collaboration with Richard Kroeker and Wolfrom Engineering, the Muscowpetung Powwow Arbour is an open-air venue that supports an annual community powwow as well as land-based programming and teaching. The structural system is made of local timber and a series of cables that works like the tensioning elements of drum heads, arrayed in a circular geometry.
Pivot
Pivot is an architecture co-op. This is radical because the egalitarian model of the co-op and the hierarchical structure of traditional architectural practices are, at their core, antithetical. While Pivot operates horizontally, co-founder Suzanne Laure Doucet explains that it is “constantly confronted by a non-horizontal profession.” The co-founders were met with confusion when they approached the Ordre des Architects du Québec to establish the province’s first architecture co-op in 2017. “How will you manage professional responsibility and liability without hierarchy?” they were asked.
Indeed, Pivot is constantly working on how to maintain autonomy and equality for its members when, for now, only the co-founders are licensed. In part, this is ensured by the decision-by-committee process standard to a co-op, but it ultimately comes down to a work culture of respect and trust. For Doucet, “autonomy means not being shy about voicing one’s design opinion, even when it differs from that of the person who is signing the drawings.” At Pivot, good design stems from a collaborative and iterative process, despite varying stylistic preferences. Not focusing on specific branding also “leaves more room for the client to bring design ideas to the table,” says Doucet. Whereas architects are often apprehensive about too many voices informing a project, dialogue is fundamental to how Pivot works, internally and externally. The team sees dialogue not just as part of the co-op ethic, but as a tool
to increase efficiency. Intern architect Angelica Peraza points out that “it is more efficient to collaborate during the design process than to do a task, get it corrected, and start again.”
BIM is another tool the team is using for both dialogue and efficiency. That’s because they believe that the intention of the software fundamentally aligns with the co-op model of shared expertise and working in collaboration with others in real time. As Adriana Menghi, another intern architect at Pivot, argues, “Technologies are not just physical things. Dialogue is also a technology, so it can also be learned and developed.”
Rather than competing against other firms for work, Pivot primarily operates within an ecosystem of social economy enterprises, and many of their clients come from within that network. While the team has embarked on a range of project types so far, they are eager to make an impact in social housing, which is in high demand and low supply everywhere in Canada. Pivot often partners with existing Groupes de Ressources Techniques organizations that promote, develop, and implement social housing projects. They are taking their involvement a step further in a current research project co-directed with engineering co-op Alte, which aims to create a suite of tools that simplify the complex processes of building and restoring social and community-based building stock.
Claire Lubell
HICHAM AHMED, SUZANNE L DOUCET, KRISTEN MCHARDY, JULIETTE LAFLEUR-LOUGHREY, JEAN-CHRISTOPHE LEBLOND, LUIS ERAZO, KHALIL DIOP, BERNARD ST-DENIS, EGEST GJINALI, COLLEEN LASHUK, ANGELICA PERAZA, ADRIANA MENGHI, LOUIS CARIGNAN, NADÈGE FREY, MAXIME DEMERS, ANDRÉ PAPINEAU, AGNES MARCOUX, CHRISTIANE AUBÉ MONTREAL, QUEBEC
1-2 Pivot’s own offices occupy a former textile factory. Polycarbonate partitions preserve natural light in meeting rooms, while custom tables are inspired by metal garment-working tables. 3-4 Pivot worked in collaboration with Entremise to plan for the transitional use and future of the church in Grande Rivière, Quebec. 5-6 Developed in consortium with Claire Davenport Architecte, the Résilience project offers a day shelter for people experiencing homelessness in Montreal. It particularly aims to create a healing environment for a largely Inuit clientele.
Poiesis Architecture
Shortly before the pandemic, Poiesis gave up its studio and pivoted to operating as a virtual practice a move that proved to be prescient. Studio leads Gregory Beck Rubin and J. Alejandro Lopez continue to maintain their own offices in Toronto and Hamilton, with meetups arranged as needed, as opposed to on a schedule.
Rubin and Lopez both enjoyed the creative aspect of teamwork within the larger previous practices where they were employed (Perkins & Will and architectsAlliance, respectively), but their current mode of collaborating, they say, has the appeal of providing both flexibility and work-life balance. The two tend to meet on job sites, or they commute to one another’s offices when they want to work together.
“We understood that part of figuring out this work-life balance and a practice that’s focused on design means it doesn’t have to be in-person together five days a week,” says Rubin. They’ll work together for a couple of days on a charette, and then go off to sort out the details, or to take care of paperwork. Says Lopez, “We don’t need to be in the same space to draft a contract.”
They bring a similarly pragmatic approach to the mission of the practice, which is generally focused on sustainability, with a speciality in passive house design. Poiesis avoids taking on feasibility studies or entering design competitions, preferring instead to see through actual projects. As Lopez says, “There’s a saying that the work that you do ends up making you as a designer.”
These days, a significant amount of that work involves projects designed to meet passive house quality control standards, or ventures that lean heavily on passive house approaches, particularly resiliency. “We talk about the durability of things,” says Rubin. “We emphasize that in the work because of passive design, but also going back to our backgrounds in institutional and large-scale projects.”
Adjacent to its sustainability outlook, Poiesis is also pursuing projects that take advantage of the new residential intensification policies approved by the Province and Toronto City Council, such as a recent move to provide as-of-right approvals to triplexes and fourplexes. In one smallscale multi-family rental project on Shaw Street, they encouraged the owner to upgrade the triplex design into a fourplex by sub-dividing the basement suite, making better use of floor areas, and providing separate entrances and outdoor spaces for all four units.
Rubin says the policy changes enable designers and clients to be more intentional about the transitions between interior private space and exterior public spaces, using transitional elements like stoops, patios, and light wells. Every unit in their Shaw Street design, says Lopez, has its own outdoor space, which is important given the increased density. “These spaces become more relevant people feel like they’re welcomed, and there’s a certain dignity around them.”
John Lorinc
J. ALEJANDRO LOPEZ, GREGORY BECK RUBIN TORONTO, ONTARIO
1-3 Set on a scenic ravine, the West Don Ravine Passive House is Toronto’s first PHIUS+ 2018 certified home. The design optimizes views, light, and energy savings by using triple-pane glass sparingly, with glazing on less than 11 percent of the overall elevations. 4-5 The Little Italy Fourplex transforms into an existing Edwardian home in Toronto to walk-up apartments that integrate with the existing streetscape.
Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop
MIRELA ALIKA, MONSERRAT BIZAMA, ONDŘEJ ČÁP,
In 1999, Rafael Santa Ana was a newly established architect in Mexico City, working on a team designing the tallest building in Latin America. He gave it all up to move to Canada, where he had to re-do his undergraduate degree, eventually complete a master’s, and finally become a registered architect. After more than a decade working first with Steve Cohlmeyer in Winnipeg and later with Russell Acton and Mark Ostry in Vancouver, he set out his own shingle.
Santa Ana describes the process of starting his own firm as onerous, but rewarding. Moving from working on large scale projects at a larger firm to managing smaller projects on his own initially caused him to doubt his decision. “‘At first I was thinking, ‘What have I done?’,” he recalls. “But the phone rings, and you get the second commission, and then the third, and then you end up needing somebody to help.” In the past eight years, the office has grown to almost 30 people. The scale of work has grown, too. For his own family residence, Berkley House, the firm transformed the original post-and-beam struc-
ture, piercing the central core to create a dramatic central bookcase wall with bespoke built-in storage and niches. Natural light is prioritized in the central spaces of the home, where distinctive spatial qualities include vaulted ceilings and added skylights. A previously inaccessible attic was reinvented as a kids’ play area, effectively creating a new usable space.
For Copper Spirit Distillery, on Vancouver’s Bowen Island, the owner was a friend that had partnered with Santa Ana on film projects in the past, with a trained eye for design. In order to accommodate the pairing of an industrial use with residential units above, the building had to be designed to accommodate fermentation in high-pressure tanks, while keeping the residences safe. The designers developed a series of alternate solutions, including effectively constructing the building as two separated volumes, and including a shaft that would defuse the force of a sudden pressure change. A glazed wall puts the copper stills on display, and faces a covered exterior lounge that extends the tasting room.
DIEGO CASTAÑEDA CORZO, DIEGO CHOUZA, ANTONIO COLIN, ALAN DAVIES, DANIELA GUTIÉRREZ, SOCORRO LEYVA, PAOLA MÉNDDEZ, DIEGO MUÑOZ, AOIFE NI CHEALLAIGH BAIRR, RAFAEL SANTA ANA, ANNA UBACH DE IGNACIO SIMÓ, JORGE URBINA, DAVID VACA, ANNA WEX, LUIS ZAMORA, FERNANDO MENDEZ, SELI LICI, ISLA PEDRANA. NOTABLE PAST EMPLOYEES: LIVIA DA COSTA BRANDAO, LARI LEVADOT, MARINA ROSA, DUCAN BATH, VINCE CASTANON-RUMEBE
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
The firm’s largest project to-date is the Squamish Sea and Sky Pedestrian Bridge, a project led by structural engineers Aspect, a longtime collaborator. The bridge design considered the vantage points of people crossing, boating under it, and viewing it from a distance. Its edges are clad with vertical slats made from oxidized steel, spaced in a rhythm that evokes woodland trees and enhances sightlines.
Santa Ana takes pride that the firm is very diverse, comprised almost entirely of newcomers to Canada. His own life experience tested his desire and ambition to excel in architecture; he sees the same drive reflected in other new immigrants. “There’s conviction that is palpable in the office: we know that [architecture] is what we want to do,” he says. People from different cultures also offer new insights.
“We bring a lot of ideas from where we come from, and we throw them in the mix and say, ‘This could be Canadian architecture.’”
1-2 For the renovation of his own home, Rafael Santa Ana created a sense of spaciousness by introducing a two-storey central atrium and vaulted ceilings. 3 Located on Bowen Island, a small municipality within Metro Vancouver, Copper Spirit Distillery is the first Canadian project to integrate an industrial program with residential units. 4-5 Spanning the banks of the Mamquam Channel, the Squamish Pedestrian Bridge connects the edge of downtown with a developing residential neighbourhood. Working with Aspect Structural Engineers as prime consultant, Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop developed a design that references local rock gullies and layered forests.
Elsa Lam
s.no architecture
The trick to working in Whitehorse is to be connected to the place. The people, comments Jackie Burgess, who grew up in tiny Beaver Creek on the Alaska-Yukon border, “are incredibly friendly to visitors, and they’re incredibly friendly to each other.” You need to be when you share the cold and dark together.
Partners Jackie Burgess and Chris Chevalier met while they were both studying at the University of Manitoba. The duo moved to Calgary for their master’s degrees, and eventually decided to settle in Whitehorse, initially working for local architecture firms.
After they decided to go it alone, Burgess brought enough local Yukon cred to springboard their office in the territory. The s.no team now totals five design professionals.
The Yukon as a whole has only 46,000 people, but boasts a significant number and diversity of projects for its population, tied to the federal transfer payments that constitute much of the territory’s revenue. The territory’s ten self-governing First Nations, other orders of government, and developers all provide a base of clients, and several have engaged s.no to design community and housing projects.
The work, however, comes with constraints including remoteness and the extreme environment. Almost everything needs to travel long distances, which means firms like s.no need to take an innovative approach by
JACKIE BURGESS, STAN POMIAN-SRZEDNICKI, CAT DAIGLE, CHRIS CHEVALIER, EMILY JONES, MURPHY WHITEHORSE, YUKON
using cost-effective and robust components. “We’re tasked with doing much more with much less,” says Chevalier. “We’re using very conventional building practices and very conventional, lightweight, robust materials like corrugated metal, and trying to use those in new ways. We can’t be looking at the latest panel system, because we probably can’t afford it. We can’t be looking at things that are heavy.” That includes masonry and concrete, adds Burgess. “It forces you to be more creative.”
By way of example, they point to a seven-unit infill project they completed on Wood Street in downtown Whitehorse. One element of the building was a large blank firewall. Using metal cladding, Burgess and Chevalier designed a multi-hued architectural mural that they have since dubbed “the rainbow wall,” and serves to animate a segment of one of the city’s main thoroughfares and public realm.
At times, the built environment in Whitehorse “is not much to look at,” says Burgess. “Local architects,” she continues, “have been trying to change that.” As Chevalier adds: “Even if we do something that’s just an urban background building here, something really simple, it has a profound effect on the community and the way Whitehorse looks and works. We’re really, really interested in that. That’s why we started the office.”
1-2 The Current is a four-storey mixed-use project in downtown Whitehorse that includes a main floor with commercial and private education spaces, and 34 residential units above. Deep overhangs provide a welcoming gesture—and sheltered area—for visitors and residents.
3-4 408 Wood Street transforms a single-family lot into a seven-unit condominium. A firewall set against the property line was rendered as an architectural mural made of vertical metal siding, adding a colourful accent to downtown Whitehorse. 5-6 Designed in collaboration with Kasian and in close partnership with the Kwanlin Dun First Nation, The Yukon Gathering Place will be the territory’s first purpose-built convention centre. The riverside site holds a deep history of bringing people together for dialogue and commerce, and the design’s form and colour nod to the river and land.
John Lorinc
VFA Architecture + Design
Balance matters to Vanessa Fong. Whether the challenge is figuring out how to use natural materials to take the chill off clean, contemporary lines, or balancing family life with a demanding career, she’s given careful thought to getting the ratio right. In becoming an architect, she struck a balance between the careers her Asian-immigrant parents envisioned for her when she was growing up in Toronto medicine and accounting were at the top of their list and her own affinity for creative work.
After completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees at McGill University in Montreal and returning to Toronto, Fong worked for well-established Quadrangle and then for its nascent offshoot RAW Design, before founding VFA Architecture + Design, in 2014. The birth of her twins prompted Fong to strike out on her own. “I had this idea that I would raise my babies idyllically, and work on one project [at a time],” she recalls, laughing. “That never happens. It just kind of all exploded at once.”
A decade later, VFA is a 10-person firm specializing in single-family and low-rise multi-unit residential architecture. Cleaver Residence illustrates VFA’s conception of home as the still point in a bustling world,
and demonstrates the practice’s collaborative approach to working with clients. One of those clients on this Oakville, Ontario home happened to be a landscape designer. Fong describes the limestone-clad front façade as “a canvas for the landscape”; it was intentionally kept very simple, almost blank. At the rear, the landscape juts into the architecture: a European beech rises up through the slim, open-ended courtyard that visually and acoustically buffers the ground floor’s ‘social’ kitchen and living room areas from quieter den and home office spaces. Passing in behind the courtyard and extending most of the house’s width is a wall of mellow mahogany slats. Gently undulating in section, the slats introduce a warm, organic counterpoint to a predominantly rectilinear composition.
VFA’s work is urbane, never showy. Woodycrest, a new mid-block Toronto residence, echoes the massing and materiality of its older neighbours, while unobtrusively incorporating a width-spanning skylight that channels sunshine into the kitchen at its core.
Architecture, as Fong is well aware, does not exist in a vacuum. “We’re so dependent on the economy; we’re so dependent on all these other factors that we don’t have control over,” she says. With its pre-
MATTHEW LAWSON, CAMERON FONG, STEPHANIE AU, IAN CHEUNG, DEANNA VESPA, VANESSA FONG, SHEREEN CHOI, LIANNE KERRY, HANA WILSON, KYLE DO COUTO, MARGOT [DOG]
TORONTO, ONTARIO
fabrication-oriented Ukkei Homes initiative, VFA is simultaneously attempting to foster closer collaboration between architects and contractors, and make it simpler and more affordable for homeowners to add laneway suites to their properties. The practice has completed a dozen laneway suites so far, and has two more in construction.
Meanwhile, Fong is exploring other avenues to ensure that her practice is resilient in the face of a persistent housing affordability crisis and fluctuating market conditions. She recently enrolled in the Rotman School of Management’s MBA Essentials program, and is contemplating doing a full MBA “to run a practice better.”
In a business in which younger employees are often expected to put in a lot of overtime, Fong strives to provide an office environment with a viable work/life balance. “I’m not saying no one in our practice works overtime, but if you need to work overtime to hit a deadline, take those extra four hours off next week or next month, or whenever you can,” she says. “Take time to go to the bank, walk the dog, visit your grandmother.”
Pamela Young
1-2 Located in the east end of Toronto, Woodycrest includes a 24-footlong skylight that spans the width of the home, and is located above an opening that allows natural light to stream into the kitchen.
3-5 Cleaver Residence results from a close collaboration between its landscape designer client and VFA. A landscape courtyard pushes into the home, housing a European beech tree. 6 Ukkei homes is an initiative creating prefabricated laneway suites, made of materials chosen to minimize embodied carbon.
SPRING ON THE PRAIRIE
TEXT Bernard Flaman and Tak Pham, exhibition co-curators
A NEW EXHIBITION CELEBRATES THE WORK OF KIYOSHI IZUMI, THE EARLIEST KNOWN JAPANESE-CANADIAN ARCHITECT.
This fall, an exhibition at Regina’s MacKenzie Art Gallery aims to bring the work of Kiyoshi Izumi the earliest known Canadian architect of Japanese descent into the public eye. Izumi (1921 - 1996) was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Japanese immigrant parents. His personal journey from Vancouver to Regina, following the 1942 introduction of Canada’s War Measures Act, was remarkable. He avoided the internment camps of British Columbia and settled in Regina with the aid of its small Japanese Canadian community. He went on to become one of the brightest graduates from the School of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in 1948, a testament to his perseverance.
Taking advantage of postwar economic expansion, Izumi bolstered the development of modernist and civic architecture in Saskatchewan. He excelled as an architect, establishing a reputation based on talent and vision despite lingering racism following the war. In 1954, Kiyoshi partnered with his former classmate Gordon Arnott and structural engineer James Sugiyama to open the design firm Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama. With
Izumi’s design sensitivities, Arnott’s business skills, and Sugiyama’s in-house structural expertise, it was a team that flourished.
In Regina, the firm was responsible for a cultural hat trick: the expanded Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, the Regina Public Library Central Branch, and the Saskatchewan Centre of the Arts (now Conexus Arts Centre.) At the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, the firm created the second master plan that guided the postwar expansion of the campus, including Marquis Hall, the W. P. Thompson Biology Building, and the Western College of Veterinary Medicine.
At the height of his practice, Izumi worked with British psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher Humphry Osmond and Canadian biochemist and psychiatrist Abram Hoffer to develop a new design for psychiatric hospitals in Saskatchewan, the first of which was constructed in Yorkton. In order to create a plan that would be sympathetic to patients, Izumi experimented with psychedelics to fully understand the effects of his design. His unconventional research method has attracted the attention of critics and scholars both then and now.
ABOVE Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama designed the Yorkton Psychiatric Centre, along with its furnishings, to ease the patient experience.
“Izumi concluded that patients required places to retreat to. They needed privacy. They should be afforded designs that encourage socialization but allow spaces that allow for one to enjoy quiet and privacy, even in the absence of single rooms. Ambiguity should be avoided at all costs, for example, spaces that require one to enter into a sprawling social space where one is immediately confronted about choices about how to navigate such a space,” writes historian of medicine Erika Dyck. “Many of Izumi’s design features were incorporated into psychiatric facilities, first in Saskatchewan, and later these ideas spread throughout North America.”
As Vice magazine’s Brian Anderson writes, “An immersion in [patients’] ‘reality,’ [Izumi] said, was ‘a convincing experience’ that forcefully reaffirmed what he considered the selfless and social responsibility of the architect, a worldview that for him ultimately transcends the clinic to include all people, all space.”
Spring on the Prairie: Kiyoshi Izumi and the work of Izumi Arnott and Sugiyama is on view at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina until January 19, 2025.
DESIGN AWARDS 2024
AIA Canada Society
annual design awards program recognize best practices, innovative thinking and design excellence in the work of AIA members and future design professionals in Canada.
SUBMIT BY OCTOBER 31 2024
Submission
Categories
Architecture
Interior Architecture
Special Projects
Urban Design
Community-Engaged Design
Open International Unbuilt
Residential (new this year!)
Student Scholarship Awards
Award winners will be published in the AIA Canada’s Journal, within the pages of Canadian Architect. One winning project will be selected to participate in the 2025 AIA International Design Awards.
For more details and to submit your entry, visit: www.aiacanadasociety.org
