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 cross-generational 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. Patron sponsors—Blackwell, SvN and Dubbeldam Architecture + Design; Supporting sponsors—Diamond Schmitt Architects, KPMB Architects, Arcadis, DTAH, Gow Hastings Architects, Andreu World, MJMA Architecture & Design, DIALOG; Benefactor sponsors—BDP Quadrangle, Montgomery Sisam, LGA Architectural Partners and V2com newswire.

Alexandre Bernier

Architecture écologique

AtLRG Architecture

blanchette archi.design 

BoON Architecture

COMN Architects

EHA

Future Simple Studio

LAAB architecture

Laura Killam Architecture

Leckie Studio Architecture + Design

Mindful Architecture

Nonument

Odami

Oxbow Architecture

Pivot

Poiesis Architecture

Rafael Santa Ana Architecture Workshop

s.no architecture

VFA Architecture + Design

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: New Perspectives appeared first on Canadian Architect.

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 architects 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.

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.”

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Alexandre Bernier appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The apparent simplicity of Montreal-based 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.

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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Architecture écologique appeared first on Canadian Architect.

AtLRG’s founders are candid about their origin story: the Winnipeg-based 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.

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: AtLRG Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

It is the in-between spaces that are the most compelling to Montreal-based 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.”

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: blanchette archi.design appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Quebec City-based 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 BoON 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: BoON Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The founders of Toronto-based 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 split-level 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.”

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: COMN Architects appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The pandemic brought elders’ housing into sharp focus for many of us for the first time. But Vancouver-based 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 independence 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.

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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: EHA appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Laura Killam’s Vancouver-based 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Laura Killam Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Michel Lauzon founded Montreal-based 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.

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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: LAAB architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Pinning down precisely what type of projects Montreal-based 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Future Simple Studio appeared first on Canadian Architect.

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.

 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 

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design appeared first on Canadian Architect.

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 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Odami appeared first on Canadian Architect.

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 North Vancouver-based 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 Tsleil- Waututh 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 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.

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Mindful Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

“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 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Nonument appeared first on Canadian Architect.

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 17,000- square-foot cultural venue for the Saulteaux Nation currently under construction, designed in collaboration with Dalhousie University professor 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.

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Twenty + Change: Oxbow Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.