“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