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 structure, 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.
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.’”
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