CELEBRATE
FALL 2019
The Christine Lintott Way
Meet Christine, McLennan Design’s newest partner and founder of Christine Lintott Architects (CLA) in Victoria, BC. In her nearly 30 years in the architecture industry, Christine has consistently advocated for the most progressive, low emissions strategies across her portfolio and within the industry broadly.
Her interest in pushing the boundaries of the profession prompted her to accept an invitation for deeper collaboration with MD earlier this year. “Our ability to scale up and expand our impact through the renowned reputation and global reach of McLennan Design is profound and represents an alignment of strengths across all aspects of design through project implementation,” said Christine in a press release announcing the partnership in the spring. “This combined team is about game-changing troublemaking, and we are excited to formalize our collaboration.” You’re a biomimicry expert—what are the implications of applying the principles of biomimicry to design? Can you point to a specific instance of biomimicry informed design that you find particularly impactful? First and foremost, biomimicry is about alignment with place, requiring us to really understand the operating condition of a place and really the genius of place—those adaptations that the natural world has in response to the operating conditions. The plants and animals have evolved to respond to those environmental conditions. If we pay attention and quiet our cleverness, we can notice the genius of place and learn a lot about how our buildings can similarly adapt to place. Think about a polar bear with a big heavy coat—seeing that bear in his place—the arctic—should signal that buildings in that place also need a big heavy coat. When you begin to really examine a place, design solutions become much more tuned to their place than they might otherwise be. What’s fascinating to me is we used to do this very well. Think about vernacular architecture—how first peoples all over the world crafted buildings in place, and how they mitigated whatever the operating conditions were. I suspect that actually people who were native to place paid attention to the creatures of the natural world and what they were doing. For me that’s the real opportunity. The real implications are really finely tuned design to place. The design solution we’re inviting here is to pay attention to what the ecosystem is doing.
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