Canadian Architect August 2021

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64 StudioAC

6 VIEWPOINT

Two visible-minority women take the lead in Ontario architecture schools.

9 NEWS

70 Uoai

How can the RFP process improve?

78 BOOKS

82 BACKPAGE

Architect Esmond Lee’s photographs of suburban places of worship.

68 S uulin Architects

72 PRACTICE

19 RAIC JOURNAL

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FLORIAN HOLZHERR DAVID DWORKIND

66 S tudio Shirshekar

A new volume considers the legacy of a decade of Winnipeg Warming Huts.

26 INSITES

60 Quinzhee

58 Phaedrus

Remembering Cornelia Oberlander.

Renewing Parliament Hill’s Centre Block; Gearing up for 2021 Congress.

DAVE TREMBLAY / 1PX

RYAN FUNG

56 Peter Braithwaite Studio

50 MRDK

KUBA LOS

54 NÓS ANDREW SNOW

62 SOCA

JAMES BRITTAIN

DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHY

ALEX LESAGE

TAMZIN GILLIS ANDREW SNOW

52 N ine Yards Studio

40 Davidson Rafailidis

48 M OTIV Architects

46 Giaimo PETER BRAITHWAITE

MARTIN KNOWLES

ENTREMISE

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42 dk Architecture

38 B louin Orzes

36 AM_A DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHY

34 ADHOC architectes

SCOTT NORSWORTHY

32 AAmp Studio

JULIAN PARKINSON

MAXIME BROUILLET

ADRIEN WILLIAMS

EMERGING TALENT

CANADIAN ARCHITECT

AUGUST 2021 03

A Quebec installation splits the house wide open.

COVER Moving Dunes by NÓS, Montreal, Quebec. Photo by Raphaël Thibodeau.

V.66 N.05 THE NATIONAL REVIEW OF DESIGN AND PRACTICE / THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE OF THE RAIC

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VIEWPOINT

LEADING BY LEARNING Some of the Canadian AED industry’s most sustained conversations on equity, diversity and inclusion have been happening in its architecture schools. Two of these schools are now headed by visible minority women. ChineseAmerican professor Juan Du is the new Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Muslim-Canadian professor Tammy Gaber is the new Director of the McEwen School of Architecture at Laurentian University.

Du and Gaber are the first non-white women to assume the top position. Their new roles are a well-deserved outcome of their research and academic work. Simultaneously, Du and Gaber will be powerful standardbearers for their institutions—and important agents for continuing to move architectural education in progressive directions.

Personal history has influenced the research work of both scholars. Du immigrated from China to the United States following primary school; she has studied and worked in Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and Hong Kong.

“My bi-cultural heritage and multi-cultural professional experiences have contributed to a sense of curiosity and empathy, as well as an openness to other points of views. I have cultivated a body of work that is consistently conducted through multiple perspectives, and which tends to challenge monolithic narratives,” she says. “I’m suspicious when there’s a complex subject matter with 100 percent agreement.”

Du’s recent book, The Shenzhen Experiment, offers a counter-narrative to the popular notion that the Chinese mega-city is an “instant city” without history and its success is mainly attributed to top-down planning and centralized economic policies. Her decade-long research explores instead how Indigenous villages, migrant populations, informal economies, and bottom-up community actions have all shaped the city, through centuries of history.

“Shenzhen is a city of 20 million, and I’ve learned to see this as a city of 20 million individuals, each with their own dreams, pursuits, challenges and contributions,” says Du. Du hopes to bring a similar outlook to her work at Daniels, especially as the faculty responds to the interconnected issues of social justice, racial equity, Indigenous reconciliation, and the climate crisis—both inside and outside the walls of 1 Spadina. “These are the most urgent issues of our time,” says Du. “They are our biggest challenges going forward, but

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could potentially be our greatest contribution.”

Tammy Gaber’s identity and research are also directly intertwined. Her forthcoming book, Beyond the Divide: A Century of Canadian Mosque Design is part of a long-term Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded research project on the history of mosque building in Canada and women’s spaces within them. Gaber studied at the University of Waterloo and at the University of Cairo, and was one of the founding faculty of Laurentian University’s School of Architecture in 2013.

From its beginnings, the School adopted a tri-cultural anglophone, francophone, and Indigenous mandate that challenged the existing canon. Gaber’s research has become part of a first-year course on global sacred spaces, which invites students to connect with meaningful places from their own cultures.

The idea of place-based design is also embedded in the structure of the school, where Indigenous Elders are invited guests to design studios, and activities open with land acknowledgments and Indigenous ceremony. For Gaber, this is an important symbol that “the architect is not all-knowing—it diffuses the usual focus on superstar personalities and designers.”

Both Gaber and Du share the conviction that leadership starts with a strong self-understanding of one’s own agency, and develops through constant learning—a belief attributable in part, perhaps, to negotiating their own identities as bi-cultural women.

“In my teaching, research, and community design projects, whether working with homeless communities in Hong Kong or migrant workers in China, I have felt that it is vital to stay intellectually curious and humble,” says Du. “Instead of immediately saying we are here to solve everything and save the world, we should ask: how can we generate new knowledge, and leverage knowledge as a tool for critical reflection, designed improvements, and ultimately, societal change?”

“Having Elders and knowledge-carriers as part of the design studios, I’ve learned so much, and that’s been a humbling experience to grow and learn,” says Gaber. “We need to be vulnerable to grow and to make new things.

Making room for that vulnerability is as important for educators as it is for students.”

Elsa Lam

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Savings by Design | Commercial & Multi-Residential

“I love the collaborative aspect of the program” Free expertise and incentives, value up to $60,000* The Enbridge Gas Savings by Design program provides free building science consulting offered over a full-day integrated design process workshop** to help build high-performance and sustainable buildings. BDP Quadrangle’s Director of Innovation, Michelle Xuereb, shares why she’s a longtime participant.

Q

As an architect, what’s the value of participating in Savings by Design?

A: The real value comes from the integrated discussions. The program brings together a diverse group of stakeholders including the client, their design team, subject-matter experts and energy modellers provided

by Enbridge Gas. We spend the day together outside our day-to-day environment, which allows us to focus our attention on solving complex design issues informed by real-time energy modelling.

Q

How is the program different from simply bringing in consultants?

A: I think the difference is that the workshop is peer to peer. For example, a mechanical engineer with sustainability expertise may present new technologies and ideas to the project mechanical engineer in the room. It may be a technology that is new to the team or it may be something they were already considering and now have the support to bring forward.

I love the collaborative aspect of the program.

Rewards for building above code After completing the workshop you’re eligible for additional incentives based on the performance of your building.

Energy simulation modelling incentive:

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Commissioning incentive:

$ To get the most out of your next project, contact Mary Sye, Energy Solutions Advisor.

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Earn additional incentives by confirming your building is 15 percent above code with a post-construction certified energy model, performed by a professional modeller.

* Projected savings based on energy modelling simulations from the Savings by Design Integrated Design Process workshop. ** This has no cash value. HST is not applicable and will not be added to incentive payments. Visit enbridgegas.com/savingsbydesign for details. To qualify for the program your project must be located in the Enbridge Gas Inc. service area. If a participant doesn’t complete construction of a new commercial property in the Enbridge Gas service area that exceeds 15 percent of the OBC’s energy performance requirement within five years of completing the integrated design process workshop, they’re ineligible for performance incentives. During that time, builders are expected to design and construct at least one new construction building based on resulting recommendations. In order to receive incentive payments you must agree to all program terms and conditions, fully participate in all stages of the program and meet all program requirements. © 2021 Enbridge Gas Inc. All rights reserved. ENB 419 08/2021

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PROJECTS Ontario’s first Indigenous Hub breaks ground

Ontario’s first mixed-use Indigenous Hub, in Toronto’s West Don Lands, broke ground on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21.

Designed by BDP Quadrangle, Stantec, ERA and Two Row, the building complex is poised to be one of the first mixed-use, purpose-built Indigenous Hubs in the country and the first in the province. The 2.4-acre Indigenous Hub spans an entire city block at Front and Cherry Streets in the West Don Lands.

BDP Quadrangle leads the design of the project, with the collaboration of Stantec on the Indigenous Community Health Centre, ERA Architects on the restoration of the Canary Restaurant Building, and Two Row Architect providing Indigenous Consulting.

The Hub will include the new home of Anishnawbe Health Toronto, the Miziwe Biik Training Institute, a childcare and family centre operated by the City of Toronto, the Canary House mixed-use condominium building, a restored Canary heritage building, and a separate purpose-built rental building.

The four-storey, 4,180-square-metre Anishnawbe Health Toronto Community Health Centre will offer holistic health programs and services that integrate Indigenous and Western approaches. Neighbouring the health centre, the Miziwe Biik Training Institute will serve as an employment and training partner. The new building will offer a hands-on carpentry workshop, tutoring classrooms, a business incubator and other multi-purpose training spaces for programming and gatherings, as well as a childcare and family centre operated by the City of Toronto.

The new home for the Health Centre is scheduled to open by the end of 2022, while the rest of the Indigenous Hub’s completion is slated for 2024. www.bdpquadrangle.com

Construction starts on office-to-housing conversion in Calgary

Gibbs Gage Architects is designing the conversion of a vacant downtown office tower into homes for Calgarians in need. The project is supported by non-profit organizations Inn from the Cold and HomeSpace Society.

Once renovations of Sierra Place are complete, the 10-storey building will feature six floors and 82 units of affordable housing for vulnerable populations including low-income women, women with children, Indigenous

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ABOVE Anne Carrier Architecture was selected to design Marieville Library in Quebec, following a design competition. The building sits on the site of the community’s former library.

people, and newcomers to Calgary. The remaining four floors will house shelter, transitional and support services.

“Sierra Place marks the first time a vacant office tower in Calgary has been converted into affordable housing,” says Bernadette Majdell, CEO, HomeSpace. “Nearly one out of every three office towers in our city’s core are sitting empty, at the same time that Calgary is in desperate need of 15,000 affordable homes. This project makes sense and in just over a year, nearly 200 Calgarians will have a place to call home, in a prime location with easy access to transit and essential amenities.”

The 8,825-square-metre Sierra Place office building, the former Dome Petroleum headquarters, has sat vacant for several years. The conversion project will create 160 jobs for the private sector and vibrancy and economic stimulation in Calgary’s struggling downtown core. When the building is reopened in the fall of 2022, it will feature a variety of one-, two-, and three-bedroom units for approximately 180 Calgarians.

The $28.5-million overhaul is being supported by different levels of government, with $5.5 million coming from the City of Calgary. www.gibbsgage.com

Anne Carrier Architecture to design Marieville Library

Following an architecture competition, Anne Carrier Architecture was announced as the winner for designing a new library in Marie-

ville, a rural community located an hour away from Montreal.

The project is slated to be built on the site of Marieville’s former library, which had to be demolished in 2012. The future building’s elongated volume was determined by the nar­ rowness of the site, and the presence of a protected archaeological area.

The proposed library consists of two threelevel volumes linked by an elevator, a sculptural staircase, and two upper walkways. From the central lobby, visitors will be able to see the entire building, along with views of the town’s church, park, and main street.

The building will include a multipurpose room, dance studio, and community kitchen. www.annecarrier.com

WHAT’S NEW RAIC names 2021 Fellows

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) has announced the 26 individuals named to the RAIC College of Fellows for 2021. There are 13 cities and communities from across Canada represented in the cohort this year.

The College of Fellows bestows Fellowship to RAIC members in recognition of outstanding achievement. Criteria include design excellence, exceptional scholarly contribution, or distinguished service to the profession or the community.

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The 2021 new Fellows are: Manon Asselin (Montreal), Brent Bellamy (Winnipeg), Helen Avini Besharat (Vancouver), Gregory Boothroyd (Vancouver), Guillermo Ceppi (Ottawa), William J.E. Curran (Hamilton), Christos Dikeakos (Burnaby), Dr. Terrance G. Galvin (Sudbury), Shafraaz Kaba (Edmonton), Patrick Kelly (Regina), Matthew Lella (Toronto), Veronica Nerissa Madonna (Toronto), Shelagh McCartney (Toronto), Christopher Radigan (Toronto), Kirsten Reite (Vancouver), Keith Robertson (Halifax), Ya’el Santopinto (Toronto), John H. Savill (Lethbridge), William Semple (Ottawa), David Shone (Vancouver), Drew Sinclair (Toronto), Graeme Stewart (Toronto), Jill Stoner (Ottawa), Adam James Thom (Toronto), Spyro Trifos (Sydney), and Robert Winslow (Winnipeg).

The new Fellows were celebrated during the 2021 RAIC Virtual Conference. www.raic.org

Parliamentary Precinct Block 2 long-list unveiled

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Twelve teams have been long-listed in the Parliamentary Precinct Block 2 International Design Competition. The city block faces Parliament Hill to the north and is the threshold to city life to the south.

The 12 long-listed firms were selected following an RFQ process, and will go on to participate in a two-stage architectural design competition.

The selected firms are: A rchitecture49 Inc. in joint venture with Foster+Partners and in association with DFS Inc. Architecture & Design BDP Quadrangle in joint venture with Herzog & de Meuron Diamond Schmitt Architects in joint venture with Bjarke Ingels Group, KWC A rchitects and ERA A rchitects Grimshaw Architects in association with Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker Hassell in association with Partisans Hopkins Architects in association with CORE Architects Inc. KPMB Architects NEUF Architects in joint venture with Renzo Piano Building Workshop Provencher Roy + Associés Architectes Inc. Watson MacEwen Teramura Architects in joint venture with Behnisch Architekten Wilkinson Eyre in association with IDEA Inc. Zeidler Architecture Inc. in association with David Chipperfield Architects A multidisciplinary independent jury will evaluate the submitted design concepts this fall, and will select the six best designs to advance to Stage 2 of the competition. Architects Bruce Haden and Anne McIlroy are serving as Chairperson and Vice-chair for the design competition jury. www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca

McEwen School of Architecture receives full accreditation

The professional Master of Architecture program at Laurentian University’s McEwen School of Architecture in Sudbury, Ontario, has gained accreditation for a term beginning July 1, 2021. The accreditation process was completed by the Canadian Architectural Certification Board this spring.

McEwen is Canada’s 12th fully accredited architecture school. It opened in 2013, and since then, over 250 students have completed their fouryear Bachelor of Architecture undergraduate degree at the school, and 100 students have graduated from the ensuing two-year Master of Architecture program. Accreditation allows McEwen’s graduating Masters students to pursue professional licensure as architects. www.mcewenarchitecture.ca

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Indigenous architects feature in TVO documentary

A new TVO Original film on Indigenous architects premiered on National Indigenous Peoples Day, and is now available to stream online.

Directed by Ron Chapman, From Earth To Sky features profiles of Tammy Eagle Bull, the first woman architect in North America (Oglala Lakota Nation, South Dakota), Wanda Dalla Costa (Saddle Lake First Nation, Alberta), Alfred Waugh (Chipweyan of the Fond Du Lac Band, Denesuline Nation, Saskatchewan), Brian Porter (Oneida Nation, Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario), Daniel Glenn (Crow Tribe), Patrick Stewart (Killerwhale House of Daaxan, Nisga’a Nation, British Columbia), and Douglas Cardinal, the first Indigenous architect in North America (Siksika, Blackfoot, Calgary).

Says Douglas Cardinal: “My Elders taught me that we must celebrate the fact that we have survived the terrible atrocities committed against us by the immigrant cultures. We know that we have a powerful contribution to make to the human family. There is a prophecy that says, after our people have been practically annihilated, our culture, still alive, will guide the world to reconnect with our Mother, the Earth.”

“This responsibility is particularly clear to us architects because we need to heal imminently the present imbalance created by the built environment and the horrendous damage done to our planet Earth,” he continues. “Not only is it necessary to heal, we need a new approach, especially to those who have been subjected to policies of abuse and exploitation the world over, and in particular in Turtle Island.

This is why we truly welcome Ron Chapman’s film. He is giving clear witness to our voices and our personal journeys dedicated to creating a better world for all human families, no matter what.”

“Meeting iconic architect Douglas Cardinal in the fall of 2017, along with 18 other Indigenous architects from Turtle Island who collaborated on an installation for the Venice Biennale, was an inspiring experience,” says director Ron Chapman. “Diverse and unique, the conversations I had with these talented architects sparked the fire for a film to document their illustrious contributions. And it has been an honour to observe, listen and learn from seven of these extraordinary professionals and feature their experiences in From Earth to Sky.”

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Michael Green Architecture continues operation amid Katerra shutdown

Modular prefabrication startup and timber construction company Katerra is shutting down. Vancouver-based Michael Green Architecture, which was acquired by Katerra in 2018, is unimpacted by the closure.

The potential construction giant launched in Silicon Valley in 2015. Despite a $2-billion investment by SoftBank to support the company in upending the construction industry using cross-laminated timber (CLT), Katerra has shut down and dropped its current construction projects.

In a statement, Michael Green Architecture writes: “We are sad for the many people impacted by this decision. However, we are grateful that these actions have no impact on our operations, other than the movement of MGA shares back into our control. We are fortunate that we have been insulated from Katerra’s challenges because Principals Michael Green and Natalie Telewiak have been and remain the controlling Directors of the firm.” www.mg-architecture.ca

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NEWS

Perkins&Will to design open-access carbon reduction tool

Perkins&Will, in collaboration with C Change Labs and Building Transparency Canada, has been awarded a $460,000 grant from the CleanBC Building Innovation Fund to develop a tool that facilitates the design of low-carbon buildings.

Known as the Tally Climate Action Tool (tally CAT), the tool will build on existing technologies to provide open, real-time access to material and product information within design software.

“This grant would not have been possible without the support from industry partners and clients who recognized the need for this climate action tool,” says Kathy Wardle, director of sustainability of Perkins&Will’s Vancouver studio. “The next step in this journey is to combine our expertise in materials and the design process into a digital tool that serves the entire industry.”

After development, tally CAT will be a globally available, integrated plug-in for designers to access within BIM software to source Building Transparency’s existing global catalogue of EPDs. Its anticipated release date is March 2023. perkinswill.com

career in architecture, especially centred on Indigenous peoples and the Canadian Arctic,” according to the citation from Carleton University.

Ms. Burdett-Moulton is from Labrador and spent her early life in a traditional nomadic lifestyle. She was the first architect to practice in what is now Nunavut, and has worked in architecture for more than 40 years.

She has led more than 150 design projects across northern Canada with an emphasis on honouring Inuit heritage and culture.

In 1976 Harriet graduated from TUNS, now the Dalhousie School of Architecture, and became the first registered Indigenous female architect in Canada in 1979. She has received many honours in her career. In 2016, she was made a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In 2017, she was awarded a Labradorian of Distinction medal. In 2018, Ms. Burdett-Moulton was one of the representatives of Canada at the Architectural Venice Biennale. She is currently a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Indigenous Task Force.

“The opportunities that come to you may be something quite different from what you are imagining,” Burdett-Moulton advises graduating architects in her commencement address. “Do what you enjoy doing to the very best of your ability, and your style will be in your stamp.” www.carleton.ca

Harriet Burdett-Moulton receives honorary doctorate

Carleton University has presented an honorary doctorate to Métis architect Harriet Burdett-Moulton. She is among seven recipients of honorary degrees from Carleton in recognition of contributions to their chosen fields and Canadian society.

Harriet Burdett-Moulton was awarded the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, on June 17, 2021 “in recognition of her distinguished

Verdun honours Dan Hanganu with renamed park

The borough of Verdun, in Montreal, has announced that it will honour architect Dan Hanganu with a renamed park on Île-des-soeurs. The architect, who passed away in 2017, was a long-time resident of Île-dessoeurs. A design competition is being planned to renovate Parc Dan Hanganu in conjunction with the renaming.

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Settled in Montreal since 1970, Dan Hanganu was the inaugural recipient of the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas, the highest award given by the Government of Québec in the field of architecture. He was an Officer of the Order of Canada.

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IN MEMORIAM Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (1921-2021) TEXT Susan Herrington When Cornelia Hahn Oberlander passed away this May, Canada lost a trailblazing landscape architect and a dear friend. Always a step ahead—and a quick step at that—Oberlander forged new territory in Canadian landscape architecture, introducing many new ideas and techniques to the field. Reflecting on her life and career, this trailblazing quality of her work really came home to me.

Born in Mülheim, Germany in 1921, Oberlander immigrated to the United States as a teenager. She was part of the second cohort of students that included women to attend Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). After graduating with a BLA in 1947, she was determined to participate in the postwar transformations taking place in North American cities. Key to this endeavour was her collaboration with architects. This commitment to collaboration was forged at the GSD, where teachers such as Walter Gropius introduced collaborative studio problems to architecture, landscape architecture, and planning students. It was further reinforced by her time in the Philadelphia, when she worked with architect Louis Kahn and landscape architect Dan Kiley, as well as with architect Oscar Stonorov.

Cornelia and her architect-husband Peter Oberlander arrived in Vancouver in the 1950s. Both were proponents of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and soon Oberlander was working on single family homes with architects such as Frederic Lasserre, Harry Lee, and Thompson Berwick Pratt and Partners. In an article for The Canadian Architect in 1956, she advised architects and landscape architects to “explore the possibilities of a site, so that the house and the area around it be planned as one unit.”

She stressed the importance of fitting the house to the land: a site-focused design approach that would become emblematic of architecture and landscape architecture in British Columbia.

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Oberlander was also landscape architect for the city’s first experiments in social housing, McLean Park and Skeena Terrace, with the CMHC, Harold Semmens and Underwood McKinley Cameron. Oberlander’s 1962 planting design included trees with grand canopies, such as copper beech and gingko. These stately trees are still standing today, and contribute greatly to the atmosphere of their projects, providing dappled light and counterbalancing the scale of the towers, helping them fit into their surrounding neighbourhoods.

Oberlander’s collaboration with Arthur Erickson on Robson Square was her most celebrated. The project also commenced a professional relationship that lasted 36 years and involved numerous projects in Canada and the United States. Erickson once remarked, “most landscape architects I’d use before were too [...] sentimental [...] not tough enough. Not intellectually up to the challenge. But I remember Cornelia felt the potential.”

At Erickson’s office, she met young architects Bing Thom, Nick Milkovich, and Eva Matsuzaki, who would fashion their own successful practices and work with her on future projects. It was also at Robson Square that Oberlander began to pioneer her skills in successfully bringing plant life into complex urban projects, an aptitude that she would continue to hone working with Erickson at The Canadian Chancery in Washington DC (1988) and the Laxton/Evergreen Building (1981, 2009), with Moshe Safdie at Library Square (1995, 2018) and The National Gallery (1988), and with KPMB Architects at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin (2005).

Sometimes her landscapes became the key symbol of a project. The New York Times Building Courtyard (2007)—a project she collaborated on with Renzo Piano, Fox & Fowle, and H.M. White Site Architects— is a good example. Visible from the main lobby and the auditorium, her lush green courtyard with its tall birch trees has appeared in numerous photographs of the project and features prominently in The New York Times’s promotional material. This notoriety came with its price, however. Apparently, birds like the courtyard as much as humans. One disgruntled tenant called Oberlander in Vancouver and asked her to get rid of the birds, because they were making too much noise.

Oberlander also blazed trails in the creation of children’s outdoor play environments. Never a subscriber to off-the-shelf playground equipment, she continually explored how natural materials and spaces created with earthen mounds and plants could function as conduits for play and spontaneous exploration. Decades ahead of her time, Oberlander also embraced risk-taking in play—witness her signature “wobble walls,” created with logs stacked on-end in a line. This play feature was adopted in other playgrounds throughout Canada—although they were usually much shorter than Oberlander’s wobble walls, which sometimes reached well over a metre in height.

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In the 1940s, Oberlander studied landscape design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. ABOVE A plan view of the outdoor Creative Play Centre designed by Oberlander for Expo 67.

The design centred on the idea of exploratory, self-directed play.

ABOVE LEFT

Her first landscape for children was the Bigler Street playground in Philadelphia, which was so innovative, it was featured in Life magazine in September 1954. But her most famous children’s environment was for the Children’s Creative Centre at Expo 67. Here, Oberlander used the basic elements of landscape—terrain, water, plants, and structures— as well as loose parts, such as logs, that could be freely manipulated by children. I still encounter adults today who fondly remember playing in Oberlander’s Creative Centre at Expo 67.

As Oberlander’s career progressed, she continued to create sustainable landscapes that were sensitive to ecological processes. She also forged new ground by incorporating plants valued by Indigenous peoples well before other landscape architects were doing so. Oberlander was decades ahead of the times in her work at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, where she designed an ethnobotanical landscape featuring plants used

by Indigenous people for medical and nutritional purposes. Ferns— whose spores had been used to make powders for healing wounds—and mahonia shrubs—whose berries were consumed raw or used in jams and

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ABOVE At Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology, Oberlander used Indigenous plants to create a naturalized meadow.

jellies—were planted in the undergrowth of the preserved forest. Oberlander’s entryway mounds were planted with her custom seed mix of long grasses and sand dune flowers. This could be considered one of the first instances of the now-popular “rewilding”–and it was 1976!

Oberlander’s deep commitment to ecology and Indigenous cultures ultimately led her to the North—another trailblazing direction in her career. About ten years ago, landscape architects began looking to the North, where the impacts of climate change are exacerbated. In 2011, for example, the Nunavut Association of Landscape Architects hosted the Canada-wide CSLA congress. Of course, Oberlander had been there decades earlier. Beginning in 1991, she consulted with Pin/Matthews Architects and Matsuzaki Wright Architects on the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly in Yellowknife. This project prompted her to invent a novel planting approach that embraced her dictum “plant what you see.” In the 1990s, no nursery in Yellowknife was willing to grow plants from seed for her landscape. So, she collected seeds, clippings, and tissue cultures of kinnikinnick, rose hips, saxifrages, vaccinium and other plants from the Yellowknife site. This material was transported back to Vancouver for cultivation in greenhouses. When planting in Yellowknife began, she returned with the vegetation—genetic progenitors of the plants that had been growing on the site.

These were planted using a technique she called “invisible mending.”

Borrowed from sewing, the goal of invisible mending was to attract as little attention as possible to the stitch itself. Applied to the landscape, plants were not installed in defined planting areas, but instead interspersed in disturbed areas and bare patches—an approach that made the planting process invisible. Oberlander liked to joke about an American garden historian who visited the Yellowknife site. The historian kept complaining to the tour guides that she couldn’t find Cornelia’s planting beds.

Oberlander returned to the North to work on the landscape of the East Three School in Inuvik with architect Gino Pin. In Inuvik, Oberlander combined her commitment to collaboration, her knowledge of children’s play environments, and her “plant what you see” approach. She also invented a unique layout scheme for trees that addressed the extreme conditions of the North. A major challenge in the Arctic is the formation of snowdrifts, exacerbated by the Coriolis Force—the deflection of wind movement caused by the rotation of the earth, which is greatest at the poles. With climate change, lower, stronger blowing snow combined with the Coriolis Force

made snowdrift calculations increasingly complex. To protect the school and the children, Oberlander devised a tree layout method that created a landscape-integrated shelterbelt, helping to refract blowing snow and avoiding accumulation up against the school and its entranceways.

Interestingly, her tree layout method was inspired by a point-and-line exercise which Oberlander had been exposed to as a student at the GSD in 1946, when the school was experimenting with Bauhaus Vorkurs methods.

The exercise was meant to create a balanced randomness. Oberlander drew random lines across the borders of the East Three School site plan, and placed dots where lines intersected each other, with each dot locating the position of a tree. The original intent of this Bauhaus-inspired method was to enhance the movement of the eye and the visual imagination.

For Oberlander, it also provided a means of refracting snowdrifts.

Oberlander’s trailblazing approach to landscape architecture has yielded outstanding results. Canada’s designed landscapes would not have been the same without her. It has been an honour to learn from her amazing work—and to become one of her many friends who admired her quick sense of humour, unstoppable determination, and contagious optimism for the future. She is sorely missed.

Susan Herrington is a professor in the landscape architecture program at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA). She received the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize for her book Cornelia Hahn Oberland-

er: Making the Modern Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2014).

MEMORANDA 2021 Canadian Architect Awards open for entries

Our annual program recognizing the country’s top future projects is open for submissions. This year also includes our fourth annual architectural photography competition. Entries are due September 16, 2021. www.canadianarchitect.com/awards

Indigenous Education Fund launches for applications

Indigenous architecture and engineering students in British Columbia are invited to apply for a newly established $5,000 award. Expressions of interest are due September 30, 2021. www.IndigenousAEaward.ca

RAIC International Prize invites submissions

The biannual RAIC International Prize is open for submissions. The Prize celebrates socially transformative architecture that embodies Canadian values of respect and inclusiveness. Submissions for the Prize are due December 3, 2021. internationalprize.raic.com

RAIC International Prize Scholarships open for student essays

In conjunction with its International Prize, the RAIC offers three scholarships to Canadian architecture students, each worth $5,000.

The juried competition is based on student essays on the subject of architecture’s social impact. Submissions for the Scholarships are due January 14, 2022. internationalprize.raic.com

For the latest news, visit www.canadianarchitect.com/news and sign up for our weekly e-newsletter at www.canadianarchitect.com/subscribe

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19 Briefs En bref Call for submissions for the 2022 RAIC International Prize The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada is pleased to begin accepting submissions for the 2022 RAIC International Prize. The Prize, awarded every two years, celebrates architecture that is judged to be transformative within its societal context and emblematic of the human values of respect and inclusiveness.

Architects, teams of architects, and architectled collaborations are invited to submit a building or a related group of buildings that has been completed, occupied and in use for at least two years prior to the entry deadline. The deadline for receipt of submissions for the 2022 RAIC International Prize is December 3, 2021. For more information and to submit, visit internationalprize.raic.org.

RAIC Journal Journal de l’IRAC A rendering of the entry courtyard to the renovated Centre Block of Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

Un rendu de la cour d’entrée de l’édifice du Centre (rénové) de la Colline du Parlement à Ottawa.

Appel de candidatures pour le Prix international de l’IRAC 2022 L’Institut royal d’architecture du Canada accepte maintenant avec plaisir les candidatures pour le Prix international de l’IRAC 2022. Le Prix, décerné tous les deux ans, célèbre l’architecture jugée comme étant transformatrice dans son contexte sociétal et emblématique des valeurs humaines de respect et d’inclusion.

Les architectes, les équipes d’architectes et les consortiums dirigés par un architecte sont invités à soumettre un bâtiment ou un ensemble de bâtiments connexes achevé, occupé et utilisé depuis au moins deux ans à la date limite de présentation des candidatures qui est fixée au 3 décembre 2021.

Online Indigenous Cultural Awareness Training for the Architecture Community The RAIC has partnered with NVision Insight Group to offer an Indigenous cultural awareness training program for the architecture community.

Learn more and register for the course at raic.org.

Formation en ligne de sensibilisation à la culture autochtone offerte à la communauté architecturale L’IRAC s’est associé à NVision Insight Group pour offrir un programme de formation à la collectivité de l’architecture sur la sensibilisation à la culture autochtone. Obtenez de plus amples renseignements et inscrivez-vous au cours à l’adresse raic.org.

The RAIC is the leading voice for excellence in the built environment in Canada, demonstrating how design enhances the quality of life, while addressing important issues of society through responsible architecture. www.raic.org L’IRAC est le principal porte-parole en faveur de l’excellence du cadre bâti au Canada. Il démontre comment la conception améliore la qualité de vie tout en tenant compte d’importants enjeux sociétaux par la voie d’une architecture responsable. www.raic.org/fr

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Building Back Better Reconstruire en mieux Tanner Morton Editor, RAIC Journal Rédacteur en chef, Journal de l’IRAC

Reflecting on the year so far has been a complex exercise. While there have been significant strides in combatting COVID-19 to celebrate, this week British Columbia reached record-high temperatures as a heatwave rolls through the Pacific Northwest. Across the country, Canadians are still grappling with the discovery of remains at former Residential schools and the necessity to continue an inquest into other sites.

The need for reconciliation and Climate Action are two vital issues that architects can contribute to and support using their specialized expertise and knowledge. From opening space for Indigenous architects and methodologies, to seriously reflecting on the history and current ethical practices in the profession, there are still considerable commitments to make to meet the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action.

As for Canada’s environmental future, it is worth repeating that architects have a profound role in creating a more sustainable society through an ethically and environmentally driven professional practice.

The phrase “build back better” has been bandied about as countries around the world look towards a post-pandemic future, but true systemic and societal change is possible. Architects have an instrumental role to play as we work to face whatever challenges come next.

La réflexion sur l’année écoulée jusqu’à maintenant s’est avérée un exercice complexe. Alors que des progrès importants ont été réalisés dans la lutte contre la COVID-19, les températures ont atteint des valeurs record en Colombie-Britannique en raison d’une vague de chaleur qui sévit dans le nordouest du Pacifique. À la grandeur du pays, des Canadiens poursuivent la démarche de réconciliation dans le contexte de la découverte de restes humains sur les sites d’anciens pensionnats indiens et de la poursuite nécessaire des recherches sur d’autres sites.

Pour répondre aux appels à l’action de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation, il reste encore des engagements considérables à prendre, qu’il s’agisse d’ouvrir un espace pour les architectes et les méthodologies autochtones ou de réfléchir sérieusement à l’histoire et aux pratiques éthiques actuelles dans la profession.

En ce qui concerne l’avenir environnemental du Canada, il convient de répéter que les architectes jouent un rôle important dans la création d’une société plus durable en axant leur pratique professionnelle sur l’éthique et l’environnement.

L’expression « rebâtir en mieux » a été abondamment utilisée alors que des pays du monde entier se tournent vers un avenir postpandémique, mais il est possible d’opérer un réel changement systémique et sociétal. Les architectes ont un rôle déterminant à jouer pour faire face aux défis à venir, quels qu’ils soient.

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A Revitalized Centre Block for Canada Un édifice du Centre revitalisé pour la Canada Carleton University’s Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) used laser scanning and digital photogrammetry to comprehensively record and measure the Parliament Buildings, including revealing their structural systems.

Tanner Morton Editor, RAIC Journal Rédacteur en chef, Journal de l’IRAC

an inclusive, sustainable, and thoroughly modern Parliament for all Canadians.

Heritage Conservation

On June 17th, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) unveiled the design for the refurbishment of the Parliament Centre Block and new Welcome Centre. According to a release by PSPC, the revitalization of Centre Block is “the largest and most complex heritage rehabilitation ever seen in Canada.”

As the leading national architecture voice in Canada, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) has been brought on as Professional Advisors to provide insight and guidance for the ongoing project.

Through our organization, the RAIC Independent Design Review Panel (IDRP) was formed. Composed of experts in architecture and design, the IDRP will remain an integral part of the process and project as it is carried out.

“The RAIC is pleased to be part of the historic Center Block modernization project,” said John Brown, FRAIC, RAIC President. “I want to applaud the steps taken towards an inclusive, thoughtful, and sustainable approach in the design of this important national symbol for our country. It will help make our iconic seat of democracy more inviting and welcoming to all Canadians.”

Underlying the project is a set of core tenets to guarantee the revitalized Centre Block is

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The rehabilitation of the Centre Block building and grounds will balance the needs and expectations for a sustainable, secure and accessible Parliament, while protecting the heritage character, features, and qualities that personify the home of our federal government.

Due to the deteriorating state of the building, the work to restore Centre Block with its heritage character intact presents a unique and substantial challenge for the project, both in terms of technical considerations and design. To achieve this goal, a joint architectural venture known as CENTRUS—comprised of WSP Canada Inc, HOK Inc, HOK Architects Corporation, Architecture49 Inc., WSP UK Limited, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc., HOK International Limited—has been brought onto the project.

CENTRUS will assist in the preservation of the heritage elements as the project is carried through to its completion.

From intricate wood elements and stone carvings to historic lighting and paintings, decorative and artistic works are being assessed and catalogued for proper storage—which happens in place if possible, or off-site if needed. These pieces, including decorative plaster ceilings, crafted wood and stone sculptures, will be properly covered for protection until the refurbishment is complete.

For generations Canadians have enjoyed the architectural features and elements of Centre Block, and the intention is to preserve them for generations to come.

Indigenous Cultural Heritage Preservation

Early in the design-build process, PSPC engaged with representatives from the Algonquin Nation to collaborate on the work that would be undertaken. This led to further commitments to incorporate Indigenous design principles into the new Parliament Welcome Centre. Further to this process, PSPC has announced their intentions to participate in a Visioning Session, where members will include Elders and Indigenous experts and academics, as a way to bring further engagement into the project. Indigenous consultation and perspectives are vital to the refurbishment of Centre Block and the construction of the Parliament Welcome Centre. PSPC has also committed to increased opportunities for Indigenous historic, artistic, and cultural elements to be included in the project.

Modernization

Counterbalancing the initiatives to preserve the heritage elements of Centre Block, there is plenty of work to be done to modernize the building for a 21st-century Canadian Parliament. Several major systems in the building—such as its electrical and mechanical continued on page 24

L’Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) de l’Université Carleton a utilisé le balayage laser et la photogrammétrie numérique pour enregistrer et mesurer de manière exhaustive les édifices du Parlement, y compris pour révéler leurs éléments structuraux.

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Le 17 juin 2021, Services publics et Approvisionnement Canada (SPAC) a dévoilé le concept de la réhabilitation de l’édifice du Centre et du nouveau Centre d’accueil du Parlement.

Selon le communiqué de SPAC, la revitalisation de l’édifice du Centre est « le projet de restauration du patrimoine le plus grand et le plus complexe jamais entrepris au Canada ».

L’Institut royal d’architecture du Canada (IRAC), principal porte-parole national de l’architecture au Canada, a été invité à agir comme conseiller professionnel afin de fournir des avis et des conseils pour le projet en cours. Par l’entremise de notre organisation, le Comité indépendant d’examen de la conception de l’IRAC a été formé. Composé de spécialistes de l’architecture et du design, ce Comité indépendant fera partie intégrante du processus et du projet au fur et à mesure de sa réalisation. « L’IRAC est fier de faire partie du projet de modernisation de l’édifice historique du Centre », a déclaré John Brown, FRAIC, président de l’IRAC. « Je tiens à saluer les mesures prises pour adopter une approche inclusive, réfléchie et durable à la conception de cet important symbole national pour notre pays.

Cela contribuera à rendre le siège emblématique de notre démocratie plus invitant et plus accueillant pour tous les Canadiens. » Le projet repose sur un ensemble de principes fondamentaux visant à ce qu’une fois revitalisé, l’édifice du Centre soit un édifice du Parlement inclusif, durable et tout à fait moderne pour tous les Canadiens.

Conservation du patrimoine Pendant la réhabilitation de l’édifice du Centre, le bâtiment et le terrain devront répondre aux besoins et aux attentes relatives à la durabilité, à la sécurité et à l’accessibilité du Parlement – tout en protégeant le caractère, les caractéristiques et les qualités patrimoniales qui personnifient le siège de notre gouvernement fédéral.

En raison de l’état de détérioration du bâtiment, la restauration de l’édifice du Centre tout en préservant son caractère patrimonial intact pose un défi unique et important pour le projet – tant sur le plan des considérations techniques que sur celui de la conception.

Pour atteindre cet objectif, une coentreprise d’architecture a été créée. Appelée CENTRUS, cette coentreprise est formée de WSP Canada Inc, HOK Inc, HOK Architects Corporation, Architecture49 Inc, WSP UK Limited, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc, et HOK International Limited. CENTRUS contribuera à la

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préservation des éléments patrimoniaux pendant toute la réalisation du projet et jusqu’à son achèvement.

Qu’il s’agisse de sculptures complexes en bois ou en pierre, de luminaires ou de tableaux historiques, ces œuvres décoratives et artistiques sont évaluées et cataloguées aux fins de leur entreposage adéquat sur place, si possible, ou hors site au besoin. Ces éléments, y compris les plafonds décoratifs en plâtre et certaines sculptures en pierre et en bois seront recouverts et protégés adéquatement jusqu’à la fin des travaux.

Depuis des générations, les Canadiens apprécient les caractéristiques et les éléments architecturaux de l’édifice du Centre et l’intention est de la préserver pour les générations à venir.

Préservation du patrimoine culturel autochtone

Dès le début du processus de design-construction, SPAC a communiqué avec des représentants de la Nation algonquine dans un objectif de collaboration pour le travail à accomplir. Cette démarche a mené SPAC à s’engager à intégrer des principes de conception autochtone dans le nouveau Centre d’accueil du Parlement. Dans le cadre de ce processus, SPAC a annoncé son intention de participer à une séance de visualisation à laquelle participeront également des aînés, ainsi que des experts et des universitaires autochtones afin de renforcer l’engagement dans le projet. La consultation des Autochtones et les perspectives autochtones sont essentielles à la réhabilitation de l’édifice du Centre et à la construction du Centre d’accueil du Parlement.

SPAC s’est également engagé à multiplier les occasions d’inclure des éléments historiques, artistiques et culturels autochtones dans le projet.

Modernisation

En contrepoids aux initiatives de préservation des éléments patrimoniaux de l’édifice du Centre, il y a beaucoup à faire pour moderniser le bâtiment afin d’en faire le siège d’un Parlement canadien du 21e siècle. À cette fin, plusieurs systèmes importants du bâtiment – comme les systèmes mécaniques et électriques – seront entièrement modernisés pour répondre aux normes modernes.

Les systèmes de technologie de l’information, de multimédia et de sécurité de l’édifice seront également améliorés. Les capacités de vidéoconférence dans l’ensemble de l’édifice, y compris les salles

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de comité historiques, seront mises à jour pendant cette modernisation. Depuis mars 2020, les vidéoconférences sont devenues un aspect usuel de la vie de bien des Canadiens, même si nombre d’entre eux utilisaient ces plateformes auparavant. Leur adoption dans la conception de l’édifice du Centre les rendront accessibles et étendront la portée des réunions et des programmes qui se déroulent sous le toit du Parlement.

En dehors des activités officielles du Parlement, les travaux de modernisation en cours permettront d’améliorer l’expérience des visiteurs. Le nouveau Centre d’accueil de la Colline du Parlement en est le principal élément.

Accessibilité Les principes de l’accessibilité universelle sont au cœur de la réhabilitation de l’édifice du Centre, qui est un Parlement pour tous les Canadiens. Les toilettes, la largeur des corridors, l’éclairage, l’acoustique et le choix suite à la page 24 Carleton University’s Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) used laser scanning and digital photogrammetry to comprehensively record and measure the Parliament Buildings, including revealing their structural systems.

L’Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) de l’Université Carleton a utilisé le balayage laser et la photogrammétrie numérique pour enregistrer et mesurer de manière exhaustive les édifices du Parlement, y compris pour révéler leurs éléments structuraux.

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Catch up on the RAIC Podcast on Architecture Écoutez les podcats de l’IRAC sur l’architecture founder of the Indigenous Design Collaborative. She joined host Mona Lemoine to discuss the role of Indigenous leadership and pedagogy in climate action.

Wanda Dalla Costa currently holds a joint position at Arizona State University as an Institute Professor at The Design School and an Associate Professor at the School of Construction. Wanda is a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation and has spent nearly 20 years working with Indigenous communities across North America.

Tanner Morton Editor, RAIC Journal Rédacteur en chef, Journal de l’IRAC

In the lead-up to the forthcoming RAIC Congress on Architecture, the RAIC recently launched its inaugural podcast series—the RAIC Podcast on Architecture. Hosted by Mona Lemoine, Chair of RAIC Committee on Regenerative Environments, the current season focuses on Architecture, Climate Action, and ongoing endeavours to build a more sustainable profession.

The season’s first episode was released on Earth Day, April 22, 2021. In it, RAIC Congress on Architecture Steering Committee member Louis Conway spoke with Seth Klein about mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency.

Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC. Between 1996 and 2018, Seth served as the founding British Columbia Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a public policy research institute committed to social, economic, and environmental justice.

“I have four markers of when you know that a government is in an emergency mode,” said Klein. “First of all, it spends what it takes to win. Number two, it creates new economic institutions to get the job done. Number three, it moves from voluntary and incentivebased policies to mandatory measures— meaning using the regulatory power of government to drive change. And number four, it

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tells the truth—it tells the truth about the severity of the crisis and what we have to do.”

Conway and Klein delve further into Klein’s 2020 book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, where he examines the lessons learned from wartime mobilization and how to apply them to our current climate crisis.

The RAIC’s second episode debuted on May 20. In this installment, Steering Committee member Bianca Dahlman spoke with Dr. Harriet Harriss on the publication of Architects After Architecture and the Climate Crisis curriculum at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

Dr. Harriss is a qualified architect and is currently the Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Before her role as Dean, she led the Architecture Research Programs at the Royal College of Art in London.

“Education is not just the reflector of practice—it’s the director of practice, if we want to see a future in which real change will occur in the way that we design and build going forward,” said Dr. Harriss. “We need to empower our students with climate literacy and knowledge—which at the moment is not a prerequisite within our validated curriculums and, therefore, we have a major shortfall.”

The third episode, released on June 29, featured Wanda Dalla Costa, director and

“Landscapes—we call them story landscapes,” said Dalla Costa. “Across every landscape that exists in the world are a series of stories that our ancestors have passed down through generations. The forest that we played in is never just a forest.

It is a place where histories come together, and people have come together and learned and shared and offered those shared things in the form of stories. I think when we think about architecture, this is one of those undervalued aspects: connecting to that lived experience, connecting to those places that influence our view of architecture.

I hope that in the future when we start to rethink what architecture could be, we begin to think in terms of our connection with the land and the force of those places.”

The RAIC Podcast on Architecture’s fourth and final episode was released on July 22, 2021. It featured RAIC Congress on Architecture Steering Committee member Joanne Perdue in conversation with World Green Building Council CEO Cristina Gamboa.

Cristina Gamboa is passionate about radical cross-sector collaboration to bolster systemic change and make this the decade for net-zero emissions. She practices a holistic approach to sustainability, focusing on its social and economic benefits as well as environmental impacts. Cristina leads WorldGBC’s coordination of the monumental Cities and Built Environment Day at COP26.

“The built environment has had a history of complex supply chains and a fragmented sector, meaning that it has been often overlooked because it is hard to grasp and hard to act on. However, there’s change and there’s momentum building,” said Gamboa.

“We are now in a better position to explain to policymakers and negotiators [the climate impact of] a building’s life cycle and their

In the lead-up to the forthcoming RAIC Congress on Architecture, the RAIC recently launched its inaugural podcast series—focusing on the issues and topics most important to architects and design professionals in Canada.

En prévision de son prochain congrès sur l’architecture, l’IRAC a récemment lancé sa série inaugurale de podcasts portant sur des questions et des enjeux importants pour les architectes et les professionnels du design au Canada.

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investment cycles, even though they’re long term processes. That doesn’t mean that they have to take a backseat in negotiations.

There has to be a vision. In the past, there have been some barriers, addressed principally going through energy efficiency and buildings, but now the matters are more urgent. We know from the climate science and from the sustainable development goals that we need to decarbonize fully at the latest by 2050.”

Following the conclusion of the season, the RAIC’s focus will shift to the launch of the 2021 Congress on Architecture. Held virtually, this single-day event will take place on World Architecture Day, October 4, 2021.

RAIC members and professionals in the architectural profession are encouraged to participate and work toward contributing to climate action and a more sustainable built environment. For more information and to register, visit raic.org/congress2021.

En prévision de son prochain congrès sur l’architecture, l’IRAC a récemment lancé sa série inaugurale de podcasts. Intitulée Podcasts de l’IRAC sur l’architecture et animée par Mona Lemoine, présidente du Comité sur les environnements régénératifs de l’IRAC, la saison actuelle porte sur l’architecture, l’action climatique et les initiatives en cours pour bâtir une profession plus durable.

Le premier épisode de la saison a été diffusé le 22 avril 2021, à l’occasion du Jour de la Terre. Louis Conway, membre du Comité directeur du congrès sur l’architecture de l’IRAC, s’entretenait alors avec Seth Klein sur la mobilisation du Canada face à l’urgence climatique.

Seth Klein est un chercheur et écrivain en politiques publiques établi à Vancouver, en Colombie-Britannique. Entre 1996 et 2018, Seth a été le directeur fondateur du Centre canadien de politiques alternatives de la Colombie-Britannique, un institut de recherche sur les politiques publiques voué à la justice sociale, économique et environnementale.

«Quatre mesures nous indiquent si un gouvernement est en mode urgence. Tout d’abord, il dépense ce qu’il faut pour gagner.

Deuxièmement, il crée les institutions économiques nécessaires pour que le travail se fasse. Troisièmement, il passe de politiques volontaires et incitatives à des mesures obligatoires et utilise son pouvoir réglementaire pour provoquer le change-

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ment. Enfin, quatrièmement, il dit la verité sur la gravité de la crise et sur ce que nous devons faire. » Conway and Klein ont ensuite discuté du livre publié par Klein en 2020, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, dans lequel il se penche sur les leçons tirées de la mobilisation en temps de guerre et sur les façons de les appliquer à notre crise climatique actuelle.

Dans le deuxième épisode de cette saison, Bianca Dahlman, membre du comité directeur du Congrès sur l’architecture de l’IRAC, discute avec la Dre Harriet Harriss à propos du cursus de la publication Architects After Architecture and the Climate Crisis à la Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

Mme Harriss est architecte et doyenne de l’École d’architecture Pratt à Brooklyn, New York. Son enseignement, ses recherches et ses écrits portent sur la création de nouveaux modèles pédagogiques pour l’enseignement du design.

«L’éducation n’est pas seulement le reflet de la pratique, c’est aussi ce qui oriente la pratique et si nous voulons voir s’opérer un changement réel dans la façon de concevoir et de bâtir, nous devons réellement donner à nos étudiants les moyens d’agir et leur donner les connaissances nécessaires à cette fin. Or, ce n’est pas un préalable dans nos programmes agréés actuels et nous y voyons une importante lacune. Je pense qu’il y a des leçons à tirer du confinement international qui a manifestement été provoqué par une mauvaise appropriation d’une ressource vivante. » Le troisième épisode – diffusé le 29 juin 2021, dans lequel Mona Lemoine s’entretient avec Wanda Dalla Costa, directrice et fondatrice de l’Indigenous Design Collaborative pour discuter du rôle du leadership et de la pédagogie autochtones en matière d’action climatique.

Wanda Dalla Costa occupe actuellement un poste conjoint à l’Université d’État de l’Arizona où elle est professeure agrégée à l’école de design et professeure associée à l’École de construction. Wanda est membre de la Première Nation de Saddle Lake et elle a travaillé pendant près de 20 ans avec des communautés autochtones de l’Amérique du Nord.

«Je sais, en raison de mon lien avec l’indigénéité et de mon lien avec la culture autochtone, que les paysages, nous les appelons des paysages d’histoires. Ainsi, à travers chaque paysage qui existe dans le

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monde, il y a une série d’histoires transmises par nos ancêtres d’une génération à l’autre.

Par exemple, la forêt dans laquelle nous avons joué n’est jamais qu’une simple forêt; c’est un endroit où les histoires se rejoignent, où les gens se réunissent, apprennent, partagent et offrent ces choses à partager sous la forme d’histoires. Lorsque qu’il est question d’architecture, je pense que c’est l’un de ces aspects sous-évalués qui nous relie à cette expérience vécue, à ces lieux qui influencent notre vision de l’architecture. Je crois aussi et j’espère même qu’à l’avenir, lorsque nous commencerons à repenser ce que l’architecture pourrait être, nous commencerons à penser en termes de lien avec la terre et de force de ce lieu ou de ces lieux. » Le quatrième et dernier épisode du balado de l’IRAC sur l’architecture a été diffusé le 22 juillet 2021. Joanne Perdue, membre du Comité directeur du Congrès sur l’architecture de l’IRAC s’entretiendra avec Cristina Gamboa, présidente-directrice générale du World Green Building Council.

«L’environnement bâti est connu pour la complexité des chaînes d’approvisionnement et la fragmentation du secteur, de sorte qu’il a souvent été négligé, car il est difficile de le comprendre et d’agir. Toutefois, le changement est en marche et une dynamique se met en place. Nous sommes maintenant en meilleure position pour expliquer aux décideurs et aux négociateurs les notions de cycle de vie des bâtiments et des cycles d’investissements dans les bâtiments, même si cela s’inscrit dans des processus à long terme. Ça ne veut pas dire qu’ils doivent se tenir en retrait des négociations. Il doit y avoir une vision. Dans le passé, il est vrai qu’il y a eu certains défis, qui ont été relevés principalement par des mesures d’efficacité énergétique dans les bâtiments, mais aujourd’hui, les questions sont plus urgentes. Nous savons grâce à la science du bâtiment et aux objectifs de développement durable, que nous devons décarboniser complètement notre secteur au plus tard en 2050. » Une fois la saison terminée, l’IRAC se concentrera sur le lancement du Congrès sur l’architecture de 2021. Cet événement d’une journée se tiendra en mode virtuel le 4 octobre 2021, en marge de la Journée mondiale de l’architecture. Les membres de l’IRAC et les professionnels de l’architecture sont invités à y participer et à contribuer à l’action climatique et à un environnement bâti plus durable. Pour de plus amples renseignements et pour vous inscrire, veuillez visiter l’adresse raic.org/congress2021.

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suite de la page 23 du mobilier sont conçus en fonction de l’accessibilité pour tous les Canadiens. Les principes de l’accessibilité sont également appliqués dans les salles des comités, les chambres et les galeries du Sénat et de la Chambre des communes – qui ne comprenaient pas de sièges accessibles et qui seront réaménagées pour offrir un accès et des accommodements additionnels. De plus, les cours intérieures autrefois inaccessibles seront fermées et comprendront un espace de rassemblement et de rencontre entre l’édifice du Centre et le Centre d’accueil.

Les cours seront dotées de nouvelles cages d’escalier avec sorties de secours attenantes pour respecter les exigences des codes en matière d’acces­sibilité et de sécurité des personnes.

Durabilité et efficacité énergétique

continued from page 22 operations—will be fully updated to suit modern standards. The IT capabilities, including security and a variety of forms of multimedia, will be enhanced as well. Video conferencing capabilities throughout the building, including the historic committee rooms, will be updated during the technological overhaul. Since March 2020, video conferencing has become a regular aspect of the lives of many Canadians, though plenty used these platforms beforehand as well. Their further adoption in the design of Centre Block will allow for the expanded accessibility and reach of the meetings and programs that happen under the parliamentary roof.

Outside of official business in Parliament, modernization work is underway to bolster the public visitor experience. Primary among these features is a new Welcome Centre for Parliament Hill.

gregate and meet between Centre Block and the Welcome Centre. The courtyards will feature new stairwells with attached fire exits to meet the required accessibility and life safety codes.

Sustainability and Energy Efficiency

Accessibility

Centre Block—with its open courtyards, weathered building envelope and ageing building systems—consumed a significant amount of energy per square metre to operate and maintain occupant comfort. In fact, according to PSPC, Centre Block was the largest energy consumer and greenhouse gas emitter per sqaare metre in their portfolio and on Parliament Hill.

Core to the redesign of Centre Block, which is a Parliament for all Canadians, is rooting the design in the principles of universal accessibility. Washrooms, corridor sizing, lighting, acoustics, and choice of furniture are being designed to provide an experience accessible to all Canadians. The committee rooms, chambers, and galleries for the Senate and House of Commons—which previously did not allow for accessible seating—will be retrofitted for additional access and accommodations. Additionally, the formerly inaccessible courtyards will be enclosed and allow for a space to con-

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To make Centre Block more energy-efficient—in keeping with the desire for a more sustainable Canada—the building will undergo several upgrades to its systems. To start, the building’s existing windows will be replaced with new, energy-efficient windows, with a design that conserves their heritage character. Insulation will be added to key areas of the walls and roofs, and air leakage and gaps will be reduced to improve energy efficiency. The courtyards will be covered with glass roofs, decreasing the exterior wall area by more than 33% and significantly reducing heat loss.

The refurbishment of Centre Block and the creation of a new Welcome Centre is a complex decade-long project–slated to be completed by 2031. Further details and updates on the project will be published by both the RAIC and PSPC as the project progresses.

A digital model created by CIMS shows the steel structural supports in the House of Commons Chamber.

Un modèle numérique créé par CIMS montre les éléments structuraux en acier dans la Chambre des communes.

Pour améliorer l’efficacité énergétique de l’édifice du Centre – en accord avec le désir d’un Canada plus durable – plusieurs systèmes du bâtiment seront modernisés. Pour commencer, les fenêtres actuelles du bâtiment seront remplacées par de nouvelles fenêtres à haut rendement énergétique qui préserveront également son caractère patrimonial. De l’isolant sera ajouté aux zones clés des murs et des toits, et l’infiltration d’air sera réduite pour améliorer l’efficacité énergétique. Les cours intérieures seront recouvertes de toits en verre, ce qui diminuera la surface des murs extérieurs de plus de 33 % et réduira considérablement les pertes de chaleur.

L’édifice du Centre, avec ses cours ouvertes, son enveloppe de bâtiment usée par les intempéries et ses systèmes de construction fatigués, consommait une quantité importante d’énergie par mètre carré pour fonctionner et maintenir le confort des occupants.

En fait, selon SPAC, l’édifice du Centre était le plus grand consommateur d’énergie et émetteur de gaz à effet de serre par mètre carré de son portefeuille et de la Colline du Parlement. À l’heure actuelle, le projet de réhabilitation de l’édifice du Centre et de création d’un nouveau Centre d’accueil est un projet complexe qui s’étalera sur une décennie et qui devrait être achevé en 2031. D’autres détails et comptes rendus sur le projet seront publiés par l’IRAC et SPAC au fur et à mesure de l’avancement du projet.

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INSITES

GODS AMONG US TEXT

Doris McCarthy Gallery Esmond Lee

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A SCARBOROUGH ARCHITECT-PHOTOGRAPHER DOCUMENTS THE UNLIKELY BUILDINGS THAT SERVE AS PLACES OF WORSHIP FOR THE SUBURB’S DIVERSE FAITH COMMUNITIES.

Esmond Lee’s ongoing project Gods Among Us presents a history of Scarborough’s diverse faith communities through representation of provisional architectural homes for places of worship. Often operating under the vernacular of industrial plazas and ubiquitous strip malls, these buildings provide important spaces for newcomers to socialize and to worship. The Scarborough-based artist and architect’s images of these meeting places are positioned on a curious architectural feature at Malvern Town Centre, highlighting the structure’s cathedral-like qualities.

Whether located in the corner of an old plaza or standing tall at a major intersection, the spaces that Lee has documented are more than just buildings; they are second homes for communities to come together and share their culture. Lee, a second-generation Canadian, remembers going to church with his mother and feeling a sense of unity within this newfound community. To immigrants, these places nurture the sense of belonging in a new land, and can lead to spiritual, social, and economic connections.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Esmond Lee’s installation includes his 2019 photos of Masjid Bilal; Jame Abu Bakr Siddique; Masjid Al-Jannah; East Scarborough Pentecostal Worship Centre; and Sri Ayyappa Samajam of Ontario.

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Lee’s research, often taking the form of meandering walks to far-flung plazas and strip malls, revealed that Scarborough is home to around 300 such improvised places of worship. Unlike central Toronto, where minority groups make up around 39% of the total population, the suburb of Scarborough has a vibrant immigrant community with an astounding 74% of residents identifying as visible minorities. As the number of newcomers increases, and the countries of origin diversify, so has the need for places of faith. With true immigrant resourcefulness, this sometimes means finding affordable, available space in unexpected, and even unlikely places—a mosque tucked next to a Pizza Nova, or a Pentecostal church in an industrial plaza. The multiplicity of these locations reflects the diversity of the communities that constitute Scarborough.

In this installation, Lee’s large-scale photographs are situated in a space similar to many of those he photographs: a structure in front of a mall, surrounded by a parking lot. His images heighten the resemblance of this idiosyncratic structure to the frame of a house or a cathedral, while maintaining its function as a path toward the mall. Not unlike places of worship, malls are a gathering place for people from all backgrounds, ages, and socioeconomic status. Viewing these familiar locations from a different perspective, Lee generates a typology of spiritual sites that invite contemplation of the possibilities therein.

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TWENTY + CHANGE: EMERGING TALENT

This year, Canadian Architect teamed up with Twenty + Change to identify a group of emerging practices from across the country, selected both for their approach to practice and for the strength of their projects.

Over long Zoom calls, we discussed and debated more than 90 portfolios garnered through an open call for submissions. The resulting selection of 20 firms is a snapshot of the range of concerns of young practices across the country—and their range of built work.

We were particularly interested in firms that showed design ambition and an appetite for risk. What work is pushing boundaries and displaying inventiveness in its approach to program, design, and tectonic explorations?

How might a young firm set out a solid approach to design, and carry that through multiple projects? How does ambition translate into the successful execution of built work? We asked that firms submit at least one built project, and scrutinized each practice’s approach to detailing, ability to create inspiring spaces, and execution of completed projects.

The challenges of practice vary from place to place. In cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, there’s a crowded marketplace, full of firms of all sizes and specialties. In smaller centers, there may not be an established design culture. Many of the architects we’ve selected have adapted their practice to their location—in some cases, creating a niche for themselves, and in others, becoming active in building design awareness and appreciation in their communities. Architects

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IT TAKES COURAGE TO LAUNCH ANY BUSINESS, BUT STARTING AN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE IS ESPECIALLY DAUNTING. ARCHITECTURE PRESENTS MANY COMPLEXITIES: FROM FINDING CLIENTS, TO MEETING BUDGETS, TO NEGOTIATING CONSTRUCTION—LET ALONE ESTABLISHING A PORTFOLIO WITH A RECOGNIZABLE DESIGN VISION. DESPITE THESE CHALLENGES, YOUNG CANADIAN DESIGN PRACTICES ARE PRODUCING EXCEPTIONAL WORK THAT POINTS TO NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE PROFESSION.

of all ages should take note: gradually, these firms are shifting the landscape of practice, carving out new roles for architects both in the industry and outside the profession.

Consistently, the firms we selected exhibited a remarkable thoughtfulness towards their work. Today’s young architects are concerned with the social and environmental impacts of their work, and many are pursuing an alternative approach to the practice of architecture. They’re advocating for increased density in urban neighbourhoods, pursuing communityoriented work, and choosing adaptive reuse projects over new builds.

In our selection, we also aimed to embrace diversity: showing different types of work from different parts of Canada, a variety of approaches, and architects of different cultures and backgrounds. We believe that diversity of all kinds enriches the practice of architecture and the design of the built environment—and ultimately, the way people in our society live, learn, work and play together.

This group of 20 practices represents Twenty + Change’s fifth showcase of Canada’s newest and brightest young designers and Canadian Architect’s third round-up of emerging firms. We’re excited and inspired by the diverse and thoughtful work that we have seen, and hope that you are, too.

Heather Dubbeldam, Krystal Kramer, and Elsa Lam twentyandchange.org

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Prenez Place! by ADHOC architectes.

Photo by Raphael Thibodeau

OPENING SPREAD

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Twenty + Change: Emerging Talent 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

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AAmp Studio ANNE-MARIE ARMSTRONG, ANDREW ASHEY TORONTO, ONTARIO

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For Anne-Marie Armstrong and Andrew Ashey, collaboration, advocacy, and diversity are the way forward for architecture.

Since starting AAmp Studio in 2014, they’ve challenged the traditional top-down approach to architecture, striving to listen deeply to their clients and stakeholders. In Ashey’s view, their work often has a larger social dimension. “We are trained to advocate for the best space for the public good,” he says. Similarly, for Armstrong, the practice is about “finding solutions that are inclusive and welcoming of people from diverse backgrounds.” The pair aims to create spaces that are not only beautiful and intelligent, but that are also “welcoming and contribute to the community.”

This drive for inclusion is evidenced by the types of work they take on. Hospitality and residential projects allow them to develop a close connection with clients, stakeholders, and other professionals. For Ell House, they worked alongside Ravi Handa Architect and the clients “to create a warm and inviting environment with a simple, but refined approach,” Armstrong says.

They also want to foster collaboration within the architecture community. Armstrong is a founding member and director of mentorship with BAIDA (Black Architects and Interior Designers Association), a non-profit organization that advocates for improving access to professional resources and advancing inclusion. “It’s still rare to see diversity in architecture schools and the profession at large,” Armstrong notes; her work with BAIDA is helping to change that. She brings her experi-

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ences as an architect, firm co-founder, and educator to her mentorship of students and young professionals.

Prior to launching their own practice in Los Angeles (and later in Toronto and Maine), Armstrong and Ashey worked for firms across North America, including Gehry Partners and Rapt Studio in Los Angeles.

“Between the two of us, we have a bit of diversity in our work experience,” Ashey says, noting that “the L.A. landscape influenced our work [in] making sure the spaces we create connect to their environments.”

Their keen entrepreneurial instincts allowed Armstrong and Ashey to draw lessons from those workplaces and develop their own firm’s style and voice. Such varied experiences, they think, are essential for emerging architects as they set out on their own.

Armstrong and Ashey see AAmp Studio as a work in progress— always searching for the next project and the challenges it may bring.

They enjoy working on different typologies and, Armstrong says, “discovering a new design approach every time that is responsive to our clients’ needs.” Current projects include an accessory dwelling in L.A., a vacation residence in Prince Edward County on Lake Ontario, a townhouse in Toronto, and a cocktail bar in Rhode Island. They hope to eventually tackle larger public buildings. “Adding more community-centric projects to our scope of work would be wonderful,” Armstrong says.

Ximena Gonzalez

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PHOTOS AND RENDERINGS: 1,2—MAXIME BROUILLET; 3,4—DALE WILCOX; 5-7—AAMP STUDIO

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Designed in collaboration with Ravi Handa Architect, Ell House is a vacation residence in Prince Edward County, Ontario, that consists of two volumes linked by a semi-exterior vestibule. 3-4 The interior of Sunnyside Townhouse was re-imagined in the renovation of the 100-year-old home. 5-7 Derived from a nine-square grid, Four Corners House is a home in Maine structured around a central courtyard.

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ADHOC architectes FRANÇOIS MARTINEAU, JEAN-FRANÇOIS ST-ONGE MONTREAL, QUEBEC

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“We always ask ourselves, ‘Is this going to be fun?’ If there’s any doubt, we don’t take the project.” With all seriousness, François Martineau, a.k.a.

Frank, explains that enjoyment is a necessary component of his firm’s ability to attract business. “Clients come to us for the personality of our staff,” says the co-lead of Montreal-based studio ADHOC architectes.

His partner in fun, Jean-François St-Onge, a.k.a. Jeff, agrees. “If the people on our team are happy and feel ownership of the projects they’re working on, the clients can sense their passion. That comes across in their work.”

That work ranges from store installations and pop-up dining venues, to office interiors and city-block-sized housing developments. But you need more than good times to create winning results—and ADHOC has shown they have what it takes, with a number of design awards to their credit, as well as punchy projects from a 100-metre-long communal dining table created last summer for a downtown Montreal park, to multi-unit courtyard buildings like La Geode.

The contagious enthusiasm of Martineau and St-Onge is also what attracts talent, along with the promise of an energetic work environ-

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ment, with many types and sizes of projects, as hinted at in the firm’s name. “Ad hoc,” meaning “for this,” shows clients and prospective staff alike that the team is agile, versatile and dynamic.

St-Onge describes himself as a conceptual thinker, while Martineau calls himself the tech guy. Their skills complement each other, ensuring that form and function are equally met for each design scheme. At the beginning of ADHOC’s existence—the two principals met and started collaborating in school, where they also hatched the idea for the firm, which they went on to found in 2014—they focused on infill architecture. Honing their skills on these smaller plans allowed them to forge relationships with the city and with developers, while at the same time figuring out how to best merge, find and retain different talents.

Today, the number of employees stands at 25, and that, says St-Onge, feels like the optimal size. “We have enough people to be able to act like a big firm, taking on major projects like the one under way in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve,” he says, referring to the 1,000-unit Canoë housing development in Montreal’s east end, which the firm is designing

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PHOTOS: 1—ADRIEN WILLIAMS; 2,5—RAPHAEL THIBODEAU; 3,4,6—MAXIME BROUILLET

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1 La Geode groups six residential units of different sizes around an interior courtyard inspired by a crystal. 2,5 Prenez Place! was a 100-metre-long outdoor table in downtown Montreal, designed to encourage outdoor socializing during the pandemic. 3-4 In L’Artisan, a development in Montreal’s garment district, different brick patterns are deployed to create a textile-like façade, enveloping a warm, woodaccented interior. 6 Le Jardinier maximizes connections to the outdoors with deep balconies in front and garden plots behind.

in consortium with Aedifica. “But it’s important to also take on small, shorter-term jobs, so that the team isn’t only working on, say, a multiyear 50-storey tower,” adds Martineau. “It’s necessary to feed the employees’ need for creativity and connection to site.” And when the creative juices are flowing, the good times are rolling.

Susan Nerberg

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AM_A ANYA MORYOUSSEF TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Architect Anya Moryoussef ’s work is luxurious, yet pared back.

It’s characterized by a thoughtful minimalism that feels complete, atmospheric and unique.

That design sensibility comes from Moryoussef ’s empathetic care for her clients, and desire to complement their idiosyncracies in her designs. This spirit of collaboration and support also extends to consultants, trades and colleagues. Moryoussef ’s attention to relationships, narratives and character goes back to her graduate work, which was awarded an RAIC Student Medal for Outstanding Thesis. The study detailed the lives and psychologies of three characters: A Collector (a possible criminal responsible for a major arson), a Cartographer, and a Carpenter. Each personified a stage of architecture: the clearing of the site, preparing the grounds, and building of the home.

During her formative years at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects in London, UK , Moryoussef participated in consultation-intensive projects—in the case of a primary school, extensive discussions were held with teachers, parents, and kids.

“It’s a connection to the people for whom I am designing, rather than aesthetics or project type, that inspires me and brings satisfaction,” says Moryoussef, who founded AM_A in 2016, and which includes team members James Swain and Artur Kobylanski. Centering on the client also means being diligent about budgets and understanding priorities. “Take, for example, the importance of natural light and privacy,” Moryoussef explains, referring to the 70-square-metre home on Craven Road she designed for a retired schoolteacher. The project focuses

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on creating a calm sanctuary, filled with light but set apart from the street—an atmosphere that plays out through every room and detail.

Many AM_A projects are renovations rather than full new builds.

Rather than “obliterating and replacing,” says Moryoussef, “we take a surgical approach to reconceptualizing homes built in the past to make them suitable to the lifestyles of their contemporary inhabitants.”

In Greenwood Semi I, AM_A’s design adjusts an existing Edwardian house to a family of two moms and a child, making space for their independent personalities, as well as their needs as a family. Moryoussef ’s design weaves their interests together, rather than assimilating them.

Even in small spaces, like washrooms, this personalized approach is apparent. At Craven Road, the space is adaptable for aging-in-place with dignity. M’s Capsule—a washroom for a young professional, designed in collaboration with architect Gregory Beck Rubin—has a space-age feel with its contrasting dark blue-and-white tiles, and anticipates the needs of bathing a future child.

In P’s Studiolo, a work-from-home laneway studio, the entry portico is conceptualized as the first in a series of small rooms that comprise the project. Concrete blocks, leftover from the construction, create a landing that transitions between the yard and the light-washed interior. “Good domestic spaces are ones that create intimate areas for life to happen,” says Moryoussef. “Often, they are not entirely closed off or entirely open, but exist as a combination of both.”

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1-3 Built for a retired Toronto teacher, Craven Road House creates a private, light-filled haven on a modest footprint. 4-5 P’s Studiolo, a laneway office for an art director and screenwriter, is conceived as a stage set within an industrial shell. 6 Designed in collaboration with Gregory Beck Rubin, M’s Capsule is a pillbox-like washroom for a young bachelor that uses glass, mirror, and colour to create a sci-fi atmosphere.

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Blouin Orzes MARC BLOUIN, CATHERINE ORZES MONTREAL, QUEBEC

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Architects Marc Blouin and Catherine Orzes work in the bustling metropolis of Montreal. But, says Blouin, they are constantly “in a Northern state of mind.” The duo describes their practice, established in 2017, as “a tireless journey through the vast territories north of the 55th parallel.”

The firm’s commitment to the region builds on previous experience by its co-founders; Blouin, in particular, has been involved for decades in developing projects and building relationships with northern communities. Last year, Blouin received the Order des architectes du Québec’s Social Engagement prize and the firm was selected as one of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices.

Architecture faces many challenges in the North. Extreme weather significantly limits the construction season and requires highly specialized knowledge. Climate change means that project teams must collaborate with environmental experts to develop innovative, sustainable solutions.

Remote locations result in high costs and complex logistics for securing materials, as well as a limited availability of skilled labour. The evolving social conditions of the once-nomadic Inuit impact planning for the future.

“The notion of North overlays all aspects of life, and our life as architects and builders there,” says Orzes. “Nordicity,” explains Blouin, “is the complete context and environment where we work: from the

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cultural differences with our clients and project users, to the way we build and the way we get there.”

Working collaboratively with community members—in relationships built on mutual trust—leads to projects that are both respectful and responsive. As such, Blouin Orzes describes their process as “accompanying clients,” rather than designing “for” them. Their scope of work often goes beyond traditional architectural services. In the case of Katittavik Hall, completed in 2018, this included everything from assisting with grant proposals to training stage technicians. Located in the Northern village of Kuujjuaraapik, the building was originally conceived by the community as a venue for the Inuit Games. With assistance from the architects, the program evolved into a fully functional performance space, capable of hosting festivals and events throughout the year.

Blouin Orzes’ architecture often features brightly coloured façades and folded geometries. Such projects may initially appear quite simple, but looks can be deceptive. In each of their buildings, apparent simplicity of form represents years of collaborative efforts to create spaces for celebration, tradition and connection.

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Completed with Verne Reimer Architecture, the MARS Arctic Research and Conservation Centre is designed to accommodate visiting scientists in Churchill, Manitoba.

The colour scheme was inspired by the black-and-white buggies used to take researchers to bear-watching sites 30 kilometres from the city. 3-5 Over a three-year consultation period, Blouin Orzes helped village authorities evolve a planned facility for the presentation of Inuit Games to a professional-calibre performance hall. Savings from the project are being used to restore a neighbouring 150-year-old church into an intimate space for storytelling and throat singing. 6 Polar Bears International House provides a Churchill office space and interpretative area for the US-based organization’s staff and guests. The project was completed with Verne Reimer Architecture.

PHOTOS: 1,2,6—JAMES BRITTAIN; 3-5—BLOUIN ORZES

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Davidson Rafailidis GEORG RAFAILIDIS, STEPHANIE DAVIDSON FORT ERIE, ONTARIO

“Over time, it matters less what a space was made for. It is more essential that it surprises us, inspires a certain curiosity, and does not prescribe a single use,” says Georg Rafailidis, co-founder of Fort Erie, Ontario-based studio Davidson Rafailidis. “We aim to make spaces that look specific and don’t immediately reveal themselves—spaces that are charged with an atmosphere that keeps radiating over time,” adds co-founder Stephanie Davidson.

Davidson and Rafailidis met while studying at the Architectural Association in London, and planned their collaboration while teaching at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. They shared an appreciation for the “mysterious idiosyncrasies of old buildings” which “magnetize you,” says Davidson, as well as a dedication to learning from observation. The Euregio region’s strong culture of high-quality design also inspired their approach to material detailing, which takes a disciplined attitude to making the most of resources and money.

This attitude also suits the Rustbelt context of Buffalo, New York, where many of Davidson Rafailidis’s projects are located. The duo relocated to southern Ontario, close to Davidson’s parents, after teaching opportunities arose at Ryerson University (for Davidson) and at the University at Buffalo (for Rafailidis). Davidson and Rafailidis have positioned themselves between the two cities, developing a nimble crossborder practice with a reach that extends far beyond.

Many of Davidson Rafailidis’s projects are forms of adaptive reuse, applying tactics of adding, subtracting and sculpting. For example, Big Space, Little Space is a residence in an industrial shed, structured as a series of nested enclosures. The project uses minimal means to expose unexpected relationships: an enlarged door opening reveals the cross-section of the existing structure’s façade; a skylight over the shower makes an intimate space feel 20 feet tall. In a workshop named He, She, & It, three distinct volumes provide the appropriate climactic conditions for a ceramist, painter, and their plants, while flexible walls blur the boundaries between these spaces.

In Together, Apart, a zigzag glass screen draws a diffuse, ambiguous division between an area for cats and an area for people in a cat-café.

As the screen steps through the space, it subverts conventions—for instance, allowing cats to sit on a part of the counter next to cakes. Similarly, a glass window in the back courtyard wall is mounted to the outside, concealing the window frame from within. According to Rafailidis, both divisions teasingly question: “Are you in the one area or the other area? Are you outside or inside?” The interlocked, yet isolated spaces permitted the business to keep operating through the pandemic—animal shelters are an essential business. During the past year, it facilitated the rescue of 300 cats.

“Nothing is static, nothing is tidy,” says Davidson as she describes the pair’s website, developed in collaboration with German designers Fuchs Borst. The site is a kind of investigative project in and of itself, documenting Davidson Rafailidis’s works as a composition of found photographs. It shares a sense of serendipity with their architectural spaces: where accidental encounters disrupt expectations, and time continuously unfolds new discoveries.

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1-3 Big Space, Little Space adaptively reuses a 1920s garage in Buffalo, New York, into an apartment dwelling and workshop. A strategy of minimal interventions maintains the industrial character of the space and a flexibility in the way it is inhabited 4-6 He, She & It is a 135-squaremetre building that houses three distinct spaces: a white-box painting studio for him, a ceramicist and silversmith’s workshop for her, and a greenhouse for the couple’s seedlings.

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dk Architecture DAVE KITAZAKI, JAMES DAVIES NORTH VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

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A member of Xaxli’p First Nation in the British Columbia interior, Dave Kitazaki is committed to using his profession to help Indigenous people across B.C. take back and celebrate their cultures—all while adding structures to house needed services and enhance economic development. “It’s about people seeing themselves and being proud of who they are,” says the North Vancouver-based principal of dk Architecture, founded in 2014.

The new administration and health office for Yaqan Nukiy in Creston, B.C., is shaped like a sturgeon-nosed canoe (also known as a Kootenai Canoe), and, at the request of the chief, includes a central meeting room that resembles a sweat lodge. The resemblance is in basic form only— rather than a dark, smoky space, the room soars upwards to a spectacular oculus. When it opened this summer, the Lower Kootenay Band got more than an administrative building—they’re being welcomed into a living space that reflects and elevates the community’s traditions.

In most places, a health and social services complex would be considered a standard building, but in a First Nations context, it may double as an in-

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formal community centre. “A medical building isn’t just a doctor’s office,” says Kitazaki. “It can also be the main hub, a gathering place—so it carries much more meaning.” To illustrate, he points to the Skeetchestn Health Centre, outside Kamloops, B.C. Located at the core of Skeetchestn First Nation’s new business development area, it’s a health facility first and foremost. But after medical staff have left for the day, the building’s central room becomes a community meeting space where people can hang out, adding an indoor equivalent to its large sheltered outdoor area. Inside, the wooden ceiling plane is lifted on clerestory glazing, creating a single continuous plane with the wooden canopy outside, to striking effect.

To achieve results that enhance collective well-being, Kitazaki underscores the importance of understanding that First Nations are not monolithic. “All First Nations are unique, and each has its own culture, ceremonies and history,” he says. What’s more, the process—from feasibility study to design and construction—is different from working with non-Indigenous clients. With First Nations, the client is a larger

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stakeholder group: it includes band council and, depending on the Nation’s structure and traditions, Elders and hereditary Chiefs. There are also cultural considerations to take into account, such as whether site blessings need to occur prior to construction, and if the building needs to accommodate smudging ceremonies. “You really need a deeper level of input from the people who will be using the building.”

This social responsibility goes hand-in-hand with environmental stewardship. “All First Nations believe we are part of the land, so sustainability is fundamental,” says Kitazaki. He adds that many communities operate with limited maintenance budgets, so energy-efficient design is also essential on a practical level.

“My goal is to design buildings that proudly represent my clients,” says Kitazaki. He’s currently looking forward to the grand opening of the Haisla Health Centre in Kitimat, B.C. Resembling a traditional longhouse, the front third of the building is a traditional post-andbeam structure with two log columns and a log beam framing the

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1 A soaring canopy provides a warm welcome and a sheltered gathering place for visitors to the Skeetchestn Health Centre, outside Kamloops, B.C. 2 A continuous strip of clerestory glazing allows the canopy to visually extend from outside to inside. 3 The recently opened Yaqan Nukiy Health and Administration office, in Creston, B.C., is shaped like a traditional sturgeon-nosed canoe. 4 The design of its central meeting room is inspired by a sweat lodge.

entrance. Facing the street, eight wide columns are painted to express the eight Haisla clans, and a central carving was completed by Haisla artist Sammy Robinson.

As handsome as the longhouse is, Kitazaki comes back to the idea that, ultimately, his work is not just about the building. “It’s about the people using the building—that’s what makes it successful.”

Susan Nerberg

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Entremise PHILEMON GRAVEL, MARIE-JOSÉE VAILLANCOURT, FRANCIS T. DUROCHER, VICTOR MALHERBE, MARIE RENOUX, MARIANNE LEMIEUX-AIRD, JÉRÔME CLAVEAU, ÉMILIE DESRUE MONTREAL, QUEBEC

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In 2016, a group of four recent design graduates entered a City of Montreal ideas competition for redeveloping vacant spaces and protecting empty heritage buildings. It’s a problem that piqued their interest so much, they founded a firm to dive in deep.

Entremise has since evolved into an eight-person, non-profit social enterprise. Its current directors—architectural graduate Philemon Gravel, urban planning advisor Marie-Josée Vaillancourt, and architect Francis T. Durocher—hold a vision of vacant spaces occupied by community organizations, artists, and entrepreneurs. They envisage short-term tenancies— from a few months to five years—becoming a normal part of the real-estate cycle. In their vision, transitional occupancies are the first step towards longer-term leases, and sometimes even the purchase of a space. That initial phase gives occupants a chance to develop their business models and secure their financial footing. It’s a win-win. Tenants gain access to space, test their needs and build a network. Owners collect rent on buildings that would otherwise be empty, and gain occupants to watch over those spaces.

In 2017, the new enterprise had a chance to put its ideas to the test with Projet Young, working in partnership with the City of Mont-

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real, the McConnell Foundation, and the Maison de l’innovation sociale. The pilot project enabled 35 organizations to occupy a vacant warehouse in Griffintown during the 22 months before its scheduled demolition.

A second project involved developing a downtown storefront property for the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM), dubbed Espace Ville Autrement. “It’s a co-working space for researchers and professionals in architecture, planning, and heritage—people who make the city differently,” explains Marie-Josée Vaillancourt. Entremise’s own office is headquartered in the storefront, which will be available for five years to research groups, workers, neighbourhood organizations, and people living in the area.

On the go currently are projects for a 540-square-metre commercial, cultural and community transitional hub in Pointe-aux-Trembles, with booths for vendors and community organizations, and the group’s biggest project yet—a transitional urban plant for the Cité-des-Hospitalières, a 3,700-square-metre city-owned heritage property which will be empty for a decade before its redevelopment.

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PHOTOS: 1-5—ENTREMISE; 6—JEAN-MICHAEL SEMINARO

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The word “Entremise” is French for “go-between,” and the firm takes a lead role as an intermediary in these transactions—conducting feasibility studies for the occupation of buildings, carrying out needed renovations, holding the head lease, and matching up occupants to available spaces.

While Entremise’s core work is real estate, architecture is a key skill set.

“Architects are the ones that know the buildings, and can think outside the box to find solutions that work with the code,” says Vaillancourt.

“But they have to think differently than what they learned in school.”

Entremise’s architects and urbanists take a socially attuned approach to this work: “knowing the neighbourhood and the social ecosystem, and also working with what’s already there, not destroying everything.”

Indeed, respecting the needs of people—and of the existing built environment—is at the core of the work. “Our dream is to develop a transitional strategy: a program that will systematically protect all empty heritage buildings,” says Vaillancourt. “It would be positive for buildings, and good for people, too.”

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1-4 Within a 1,100-square-metre warehouse, the Project Young pilot created working space for dozens of organizations and hosted a two-yearlong program of community events. 5 A mural by artist Rocio Perez adorns a building in Pointe-aux-Trembles, where a series of transitional occupations is being planned. 6 A Jane’s Walk led by Entremise and its collaborators introduces Montrealers to the Tour d’aguillage Wellington, a railway traffic control station shuttered in 2000.

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Giaimo SHANZE SHAHBAZ, JOEY GIAIMO, KATIE LEE, STEPHANIE MAH, FAISAL KUBBA, MICHELLE BULLOUGH, RIA AL-AMEEN, JOANNE CASIERO, TREVOR WHITTEN, SARA SHEMIRANI, MITCHELL MAY TORONTO, ONTARIO

“What’s new?” is a default question. But for Toronto’s Giaimo, “What can we do with what already exists?” is a more interesting line of enquiry. Founded in 2015 by Joey Giaimo, formerly of ERA Architects, the practice specializes in the integration of sustainable, 21st-century design and heritage conservation.

The Oculus Revitalization illustrates how preservation, renewal and collaborative activism intertwine in Giaimo’s work. Architect Alan Crossley’s 1959 washroom facility for a suburban Toronto park reached for the stars. A flying-saucer canopy, open to the sky at its centre, hovers in the foreground. The futuristic canopy is the focal point, with the modest, earthbound volume housing the plumbing curving in around behind it. Over time, this space-age pavilion became derelict. In 2019, Giaimo and Architectural Conservancy Ontario received a Parks People Public Space Incubator grant to revitalize it. When the pandemic delayed the restoration and site improvements, Giaimo instigated the 2020 art installation Brighter Days Ahead, wrapping the canopy in sunny yellow rays and staging performances to highlight its acoustic value. “We’ve been working with this structure for a couple of years now—gathering funding, getting content out there, doing the restoration, continuing to program,” says Joey Giaimo.

A four-person firm in its early days, the Giaimo studio has nearly tripled in size and now occupies space in its largest project to date, which fronts onto Toronto’s version of Times Square. The abutting office towers at 19 and 21 Dundas Square date from 1913 and 1929 respectively, and together comprise the heritage-designated Hermant Building.

Giaimo’s renovation strips away decades of accumulated dropped ceilings, demising walls and finishes to expose the board-formed ceilings and columns of the early cast-in-place concrete architecture. Through research, Giaimo convinced their client that restoring rather than replacing the century-old operable windows would create more desirable tenant space and reduce the renovation’s embodied energy footprint, without undermining operational efficiency.

Giaimo’s approach to everyday older buildings is respectful but far from reverential. South House, the Giaimo family’s own home in Mississauga, partially envelops a pitch-roofed 1920s bungalow in a resolutely contemporary blue box, and on the inside strips the original building down to its wood sheathing. “When there are existing heights and existing rooflines, the dialogue between the original and the additions makes the building so much richer,” says associate Mitchell May. “There’s always something to be found in existing buildings, and that’s where we start,” adds Giaimo’s other associate, Ria Al-Ameen.

“We look for this amazing piece and then find ways to work around it and with it.”

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PHOTOS: TEAM—GIAIMO; 1-4—DOUBLESPACE-PHOTOGRAPHY; 5,6—GIAIMO

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The restoration of the 1959 Oculus Pavilion was delayed by the pandemic, so Giaimo freshened it with a public art installation entitled Brighter Days Ahead. 3-4 An addition to Joey Giaimo’s home in Mississauga forms an enigmatic blue box that houses a skylit entry and activity space for his young family. 5 For Glebeholme, a standard Toronto semi-detached home was elongated to reconfigure and expand its living spaces. 6 A temporary installation adorning the Hermant Building alludes to former tenants including Imperial Optical and a high-end jewelry store.

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MOTIV Architects TRACEY MACTAVISH, ASHER DEGROOT VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

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Former work colleagues and long-time friends Tracey Mactavish and Asher deGroot founded MOTIV Architects in 2017. The socially minded Vancouver-based firm is particularly interested in the design of utilitarian structures and landscapes—places often overlooked by designers but fundamental to the success of communities. For Mactavish and deGroot, architecture is not only about constructing buildings, but using them as tools for embodying appreciation: appreciation of people and community, appreciation of materials and the challenges of building, and appreciation of context and the land on which projects are situated.

MOTIV takes a grassroots approach to empowering their clients and transforming communities. The pair notes how they’re often going beyond the traditional scope of architecture, acting as “advocates, spokespeople and project managers” for causes they’re invested in. This orientation extends to their design process, in which community members are involved at every possible stage of a project, from pre-design to construction. Case in point: the Swallowfield Barn, which Mactavish and deGroot describe as a “testament to the community building process that shaped it.” The working barn, which doubles as an event space, is located in Langley, B.C., and offers a contemporary interpretation of an archetypal agricultural building form. The structure was built in a modern-day barn-raising, involving more than 60 friends, family and community members. This process reflects MOTIV’s holistic understanding of sustainability. As deGroot says: “It’s not just about projects being environmentally sustainable—it’s about making places and buildings that people care about [into the future].”

Mactavish and deGroot have developed a sensitivity to materials by working directly with them—encouraging a hands-on approach within

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PHOTOS AND RENDERINGS: TEAM—CHRISTINE PIENAAR; 1-2—EMA PETER; 3—JEAN PHILIPPE DELAGE; 4,5—MOTIV ARCHITECTS

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the studio. This supports mutually respectful relationships with craftspeople and informs MOTIV ’s architectural approach. Simple, repeatable details and modular components are integrated into projects like the Eton Accessory Building, which was designed as a modular kit-of-parts.

Materials are consistently selected to simplify construction and to honour the material culture of the West Coast.

Both Mactavish and deGroot grew up in rural communities, and they describe their practice as “rooted in [our] relationship to agriculture, its buildings and landscapes.” Their current work in the Southlands continues this thread, connecting where people live with the land on which their food is grown. Whether responding to the historical context of a site, or blurring the boundaries between architecture and agriculture, MOTIV strives to develop projects that are deeply—and intentionally—rooted in place.

Natalie Badenduck

Designed as a working barn for a hobby farm, the Swallowfield Barn also serves as a community gathering space suitable for hosting concerts and weddings. 3 Located in Vancouver’s Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood, the Eton Accessory Building is a garage that doubles as a studio for the owner’s industrial bag and belt fabrication company.

4-5 MOTIV is currently developing designs for Southlands, a mixed-use district surrounding an organic farm in Tsawwassen, B.C. The new structures relate to the site’s historic farm buildings, and include a market, microbrewery, and residential units.

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MRDK GUILLAUME MÉNARD, DAVID DWORKIND MONTREAL, QUEBEC

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1 Mirrors, patinaed walls, and a crafted wooden canopy lend sophistication to the Peel Street location of modern Japanese restaurant RYÚ.

2 The wooden canopy is carried through to the restaurant’s Montreal airport location, set alongside a precisely crafted serving counter.

3-5 Sliding wooden panels serve as exterior shutters for Hinterhouse, a cabin and sauna north of Montreal. 4 Moveable signage helps accommodate Caffettiera’s regular changeover from a daytime café to a nighttime bar.

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Caffettiera: a ’90s-nostalgic Italian cafe with crazy-quilt Formica-topped tables and prodigal expanses of fake walnut. Hinterhouse: a prefabricated cabin with the spareness and space-transforming utility of a shoji screen. RYÚ (Peel): a sushi bar where roughly exposed wallpaper fragments and slapdash plastering from the building’s past lives offset the elegant details of its present incarnation. Whatever the project, for Montreal’s Guillaume Ménard and David Dworkind, the client brief is the DNA for bringing a unique concept to life.

Prior to merging their solo practices into Ménard Dworkind Architecture & Design (MRDK) in 2018, McGill University architecture graduate Dworkind was designing residential and urban infill projects, while Ménard had parlayed a background in construction and industrial design into a successful hospitality design practice. Fans of each other’s work on social media, they teamed up when Ménard sought a design partner for Miss Wong, a 1,100-square-metre Chinatown-themed restaurant/bar/beer garden in Laval. “There was an instant synergy,” says Dworkind. “We have similar aesthetics, but still, it’s two different brains coming at a problem from two different sides.”

Both brains would rather devise custom solutions than specify products from a catalogue. A case in point: the ex-pat Italian owner of Montreal’s Caffettiera wanted to recreate the sort of spot he fondly recalled from his Old Country youth where you might stop in for a morning espresso, a midday sandwich, or an after-work drink. Activity in such a space fluctuates over the course of a day, with one barista/cashier on duty in the morning, and a second pay point opening up by the sandwich counter for lunchtime. MRDK integrated sliding signage into a custom downlighting track; staff manually shift the signs to align customer f low with active service points. Visually, Hinterhouse, a MRDK-designed short-stay retreat north of Montreal, is as minimal as Caffettiera is maximal, but sliding screens similarly augment the small cabin’s adaptability.

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PHOTOS: TEAM—STEPHANE GAULIN-BROWN; 1-6—DAVID DWORKIND

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Fortuitously, Hinterhouse publicity brought multiple cottage commissions MRDK’s way just as Covid-19 shuttered bars and restaurants.

As hospitality venues and workplaces begin to reopen, the 4.5-person studio is now designing an 1,670-square-metre Eataly-style emporium for Japanese food in Washington, DC, and a Montreal tech company’s office. Pre-pandemic, this was to be a 2,410-square-metre space; it will now be 1,205 square metres. “Half the size, but same amount of employees,” says Ménard, sounding excited by the challenge. “People are going to work from home half of the week, and come to the office to meet with people and have some creative sessions. We’ll be the first to design their new way of building offices.”

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Nine Yards Studio NICK DONEFF, TERRY RICHARDSON, JACQUELINE FISHER, SHERI MACDONALD, ALISHA MALONEY, SILVA STOJAK, BEN TIFFIN, NATASHA GORBACHEVA, KALEY DOLEMAN, MARK STEELE, XINRAN TANG, BRANDON HOOD, SHALLYN MURRAY, TATIANA VARLAMOV CHARLOTTETOWN, PEI

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Nine Yards Studio, based in Charlottetown, PEI, is headed by an unlikely duo. Silva Stojak, an architect in her 50s, studied architecture in Sarajevo and immigrated to Canada in 1990. Shallyn Murray is a generation younger, and grew up in Kinkora, a community of 350 people in PEI, graduating with her Masters in Architecture from Dalhousie University in 2012.

Stojak and Murray had worked together at BGHJ Architects, where Stojak was a partner. When the other senior partners retired in 2017, the duo decided to make a fresh start. “We didn’t want to put our names on the firm,” recalls Stojak. Instead, they picked a name referring to the saying “the whole nine yards”—an indication of the onestop, community-oriented design shop that they aspired to co-create.

The firm’s portfolio encompasses a healthy range of projects: government work, schools, theatres, commercial interiors, and private houses.

But the work they’re most avid about is community-oriented design.

While at BGHJ, Stojak and Murray self-initiated the Urban Beehive Project, a set of super-sized demonstration beehives, accompanied by a hexagon-tiered amphitheatre. “Design was the smallest piece of this project,” says Murray, who notes that the project included extensive discussions with beekeepers, finding a site, building up community support, and raising over $60,000 in funding. “At the beginning, we were knocking on the doors of our clients, asking for $50 contributions,” she recalls. “We were really passionate.”

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The office also maintains a workshop, dubbed the Secret Design Bunker, filled with tools for making digital and hand-crafted objects.

The firm sells limited editions of the household products it designs, and also displays work-in-progress in their office’s storefront windows.

“We are always striving to show people how design impacts our everyday life, how the objects we use and the environments we inhabit can be designed to enhance our well-being,” says Stojak.

One of Nine Yards’ first architectural projects to gain widespread recognition, the River Cabins, was also self-initiated. “We wanted to show people the kind of work we would like to do,” says Stojak, who convinced her husband that they needed to build themselves a cottage.

Recently, Stojak and Murray have bought another piece of land, twenty minutes from Charlottetown, where they intend to build a small, sustainability-oriented cabin.

Nine Yards is also working on a downtown Charlottetown Library, in collaboration with MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. “Charlottetown hasn’t had a new library since I was born,” says Murray.

“I’m excited about it as a resident and as an architect.”

“The things we do for ourselves, the things where we have the most passion—these are the things that are best received,” says Stojak.

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The River Cabins are inspired by traditional gable-roof farm buildings.

An amphitheatre and set of demonstration hives help raise awareness of PEI’s bees. 4-6 The firm’s workshop, adjacent to their office, allows them to explore digital and hand-crafting techniques on projects such as these household objects. 7 In Northshore Loft, a double-height living area and loft bedroom make efficient use of a compact footprint.

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NÓS GIL HARDY, CHARLES LAURENCE PROULX MONTREAL, QUEBEC

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Gil Hardy and Charles Laurence Proulx met when they were architecture students at the University of Montreal. Their love for music brought them to work together outside of school. After completing a multidisciplinary music-and-architecture installation, the pair continued to enter—and win—installation competitions together, while still working full time for other firms. “At some point, it was just too much work outside of our official jobs,” Hardy says. “So we had to make a choice.”

They launched NÓS in 2016, when both were in their late 20s.

Their multi-sensory approach leads the duo to create innovative spaces with strong experiential qualities. Seeing people use a space and make it their own brings both architects a sense of pride, Hardy says.

“It’s the result of many years of work, and it’s very special.”

This passion translates into the attention that goes into every detail of their projects—as well as into the makeup of their firm itself. Early on, Hardy and Proulx identified their preference for working in small, collaborative environments. “We found that if we wanted to be innovative in our projects, we also needed to be innovative in the way we structured the office and the work,” says Proulx.

Today, NÓS —named from the latin word for “we” or “us”—is a multidisciplinary team of 15 people that includes architects as well as professional artists from various disciplines and cultural backgrounds. An agile

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organizational structure allows them to take on projects as large as Esplanade Cartier, a 14-storey mixed-use tower in the Sainte-Marie district of downtown Montreal.

Just as in their art installations, NÓS strives for this larger-scale project to “give people f lexibility in the way that they live in a building—it’s not all fixed,” Proulx says. “We tried to propose a different approach to living,” Hardy adds, noting that the design is part of a pedestrian-centric neighbourhood plan, which includes amenities like open-air cinemas, temporary art exhibits, and a children’s garden.

The design of the tower references the surrounding urban fabric, with features such as winding staircases to access certain units, views of the Jacques Cartier Bridge from multiple angles, and industrial elements on the façades.

For both Hardy and Proulx, it’s key to have a holistic vision and integrate buildings into their existing environment. Instead of thinking of buildings as objects in the city, Proulx says, “it’s important to see architecture as the city. A work of architecture is a form that makes sense in a context with its own contemporary expression—and that makes sense with a certain urban logic.”

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1-2 The 2018 installation Moving Dunes, occupying a street alongside Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, was inspired by the representational technique of anamorphosis.

3-5 Three Peaks House evokes the archetypal forms of nearby rural buildings in Stowe, Vermont. 6 Voûte évènementielle is a temporary stage created to envelop and adjoin a retired Montreal subway car.

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Peter Braithwaite Studio PETER BRAITHWAITE, LUCIEN LANDRY, ABBY LAWSON, JESSICA WHITE, RHYLAND TAYLOR, ERIC-OLIVIER THERIAULT HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

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Since 2015, Nova Scotia firm Peter Braithwaite Studio has been driven by a desire to address the ecological impact of architecture. While many sustainability-oriented practices “revolve around the production and implementation of gadgets and technological innovations that reduce the mechanical or energy requirements of the buildings,” says Braithwaite, he wants to move towards “a clear and harmonious integration” between structure and nature. This is fuelled by a life-long interest in “how our urban environments sustain culture and life.”

The studio’s capabilities span from architecture to construction, industrial design and building. That allows the team “to create work that acts as an active participant in the natural landscape, rather than [as] barriers to biodiversity within our urban and peri-urban environments,” says Braithwaite. As the practice grows, they are increasingly finding clients who share this vision.

In both residential and public projects, Braithwaite’s designs embody the essence of Canadian modernity: they harmonize with their local environment, while displaying a deep understanding for what people require from contemporary spaces, both functionally and aesthetically. Houses are built into and around the landscape, in materials that give them a sense of belonging within their settings. Views and privacy are balanced in each location. Caribou Point Studio,

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in Pictou, Nova Scotia, places two distinct volumes at slight angles away from each other, providing privacy within the space but with glazed openings directed towards the surrounding hills. Narrow light slits emphasize the height of the roofs, angled steeply against accumulating snow.

Braithwaite’s graduate thesis proposed the design of a technical college campus in Detroit, with a structure that mirrored the sloped site.

Braithwaite began by studying the current relationship between Detroit’s built and natural environments. This enabled him to propose a “new urban topology [that] displays the influence the campus could have in promoting land development in the City’s residential areas,” supporting the city’s transformational goals.

Braithwaite’s interest in urban sustainability has him heading back to school: he’s recently been awarded a Killam Doctorate Scholarship, a Nova Scotia Graduate Studies Scholarship, and a Dalhousie President’s Award to undertake an interdisciplinary PhD program. He plans to investigate the relationship between architecture and biodiversity within peri-urban environments—all while putting his research to the test in his studio’s work.

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Caribou Point Studio is a residence for two artists that includes studios at each end and shared living and dwelling spaces in the middle.

3-6 Located in Halifax’s west end, the Armcrescent Residence is a seven-person home that is meticulously crafted—from custom boardformed concrete retaining walls to bespoke millwork that was built and installed by Peter Braithwaite’s on-staff carpenters.

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Phaedrus Studio DAVID GRANT-RUBASH, TYLER MALONE TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Since opening Phaedrus Studio in 2015, David Grant-Rubash and Tyler Malone have struck a balance that takes many firms years—if not decades—to achieve: creating architecture that is both functional and artistic.

Embedded in their design process is a respect for both craft and technology. This allows them to tackle the particular challenges and constraints of each project, without compromising their distinct design vision.

“A personal motivation was to return to an intimate scale of work,” says Grant-Rubash, who worked as a design lead and associate at a large multi-disciplinary firm for over a decade. “There was an early desire for more focused experimentation with architecture as a medium for art.”

“Our work quickly evolved into a highly informed focus on the experiential,” says Malone, who adds that they create spaces that “intimately link expression and function.” This plays out at every scale of a project.

Says Grant-Rubash: “No gesture or detail is untouched—even if only digitally—or without consideration, intent and purpose.”

With offices in Toronto and New York, Phaedrus has a portfolio that spans from industrial and furniture design to larger commercial projects. Its founders relish projects with complex technical requirements and performance expectations. For a narrow main-street lot in Toronto,

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the designers proposed a mixed-use commercial and residential building that combines the efficiency of a high-rise building with the pedestrian orientation of a low-rise structure. The rationalized plan and tight building envelope are geared towards potential prefabrication of the building as a series of stackable modules.

For Thor Espresso coffee bar, aesthetics and technology are expressed in a set of islands and partitions that elevate the simple act of buying and drinking coffee into an immersive user experience. The functional elements of the café are accommodated in a daring stainless steel sculpture, crafted to emphasize existing structural bays and fully integrate lighting, mechanical equipment, and back-of-house functions. The team makes a bold statement in a relatively small space by “embracing complexity with a refined and hyper-organized but streamlined functionality,” says Malone. “[The design] directs you while playing with the senses.”

Phaedrus’s ambitions might be attributable to its international perspective and cross-disciplinary experience: Grant-Rubash studied industrial design and architecture in Denmark and the U.S., Malone founded a freelance design and visualization company as an undergrad, and senior team member Bill Ma focuses on building science and

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1 Hi-Lo Hybrid suggests a high-efficiency modular development prototype for Toronto’s main streets. 2 Stainless steel sculptural elements integrate front- and back-of-house functions at Thor Espresso.

3-4 Odin Café + Bar’s origami-folded counters are created with Corian laid over plywood ribs; the faceted detailing extends to the design of tables. 5 Tesseract House’s unconventional massing hints at an interior that experiments with spatial expansion and compression.

sustainable design. But that also helps it to fit perfectly into the larger Canadian architectural context, which Ma believes has been “redefined by an expanding international design presence […] a growth that is shifting the status quo of holistic architecture.”

With Canadian practices participating on the global stage, Ma says that “as communicators and space makers, we see a primary responsibility for outreach—to instil and transition Canadian virtues from our architectural community outwards amongst a growing populace that is inform­ ed, engaged and passionate about their design conceptions.”

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Quinzhee GUILLAUME FAFARD, LAURENCE AUDET, PIERRE-OLIVIER BUREAU-ALARIE, MARIE-JEANNE ALLAIRE-CÔTÉ, ANNE ROUSSEAU, CATHERINE PARENT, MAXIME ALLARD, GABRIEL LEMELIN, JULIETTE MORNEAU QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC

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“Architects have a crapload of responsibility,” says Guillaume Fafard on the phone from his Quebec City office. It’s not a complaint, but a strongheld commitment to one’s métier and to the people directly touched by architecture. The statement also points to the main idea driving Fafard’s firm, Quinzhee, which he founded in 2013: that architecture should be a force for good.

In Quinzhee’s case, this vision entails raising the bar for urban apartments, and improving the quality of life for families who want to live in the downtown core. Fafard and his nine-person team are striving to change the prevailing standard in urban multifamily dwellings, which generally favours developers’ return on investment by cramming as many small units as possible into a single building. Instead, Quinzhee is designing award-winning projects that breathe, and let their owners breathe—literally and figuratively.

“It started when I was looking for a house for myself,” Fafard says.

He found that in the city, there were only smaller condos for singles with no outdoor space for kids to run and play. “I didn’t want to live in the suburbs, where there are no sidewalks and people are car-depend1 A trio of townhomes includes hidden terraces tucked on the roof of the brick volume, and slipped behind the metal façade. 2 Built over three phases, Les Triplettes de Jeanne-Mance houses 16 two-storey, family-sized units. 3,5 Éclectique reinterprets the surrounding urban fabric in a patchwork of textures. Each unit is organized with living spaces on the top level, adjoining a balcony. 4 B2’s six units have split-level plans that contribute to a sense of intimacy for each room.

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ent. So we had to change the typology.” The firm found a client who agreed to use an infill site to build six larger apartments, rather than the nine that a typical developer would have constructed. Each of the units has direct access to outdoor areas, and the building includes bike storage instead of a garage. The project—dubbed Triplettes de JeanneMance—has since expanded to 16 units, and while Fafard no longer lives there, two of his friends do.

Fafard feels that architects can play a larger role for good as chefs d’orchestre, overseeing the consolidation of the urban fabric by taking over abandoned sites, but also animating the downtown by designing to attract young families.

Quinzhee’s portfolio shows a holistic and collective approach to architecture and urbanity. There are no gyms or garages that eat up square footage and dollars; instead, individual condos are larger and built for long-term residents, with common outdoor spaces bringing them together.

“We’re the only firm doing this in Quebec City, and we want to prove that there are alternatives to the status quo. But we didn’t invent or re-invent anything,” emphasizes Fafard. “We just started putting into practice a typology where it hadn’t been used before.” One challenge is that developers are worried they won’t get the same return on their investment if there are fewer and larger apartments in a project—and this is also the main reason banks are reluctant to lend money.

But even the banks and developers have begun to see that this shift is a win-win-win. In the meantime, Quinzhee is busy altering the core of the city—one abandoned lot at a time.

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SOCA SHANE LAPTISTE, TURA COUSINS WILSON TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Shane Laptiste and Tura Cousins Wilson met as early participants in the Black Architects and Interior Designers Association of Canada (BAIDA).

They’re now combining their different experiences in practice and education into a shared vision. Laptiste (born, raised, and educated in Montreal) and Cousins Wilson (a Torontonian who studied in the Netherlands) believe that, as Laptiste puts it, “small firms can have large impacts, even if on small projects.”

The name of their practice—SOCA—is short for Studio of Contemporary Architecture. It is also an allusion to soca music, an energetic genre with diverse cultural influences from Trinidad and Tobago, referencing the pair’s Caribbean roots. As a practice, SOCA manages to live up to the name’s duality by remaining playful while addressing contemporary issues and social concerns.

One of the firm’s highly publicized early projects is the renovation of Cousins Wilson’s grandmother’s house. The use of yellow—her favourite colour—in the reconstruction of the building’s Edwardian porch brings a lively presence to the street. This sense of play can also be spotted in the firm’s proposal for a Dutch mosque submerged in water.

The practice is simultaneously committed to creating socially responsible spaces. This perspective is evident in their growing portfolio of civic and institutional projects, which push project mandates to increase inclusion and equity. They’re including gender-neutral washrooms in a mu-

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nicipal soccer clubhouse in Collingwood, currently in process (with Stephens Kozak Architects). For a conceptual project, they reimagined the ubiquitous strip mall typology as a pedestrian setting.

Since the firm’s inception in 2018, the partners included a commitment to exploratory proposals and research work in their business model.

Cousins Wilson says that this approach has allowed them to continually “stretch our design muscles” and think through concepts in various scales and programs, while keeping a sense of idealism in their designs.

Part of SOCA’s success in diversifying its portfolio can be attributed to strategic partnerships with other practices. Recently, SOCA co-authored a report outlining a future vision for Toronto’s Little Jamaica, working collaboratively with Black Urbanism TO and Open Architecture Canada.

The report addressed affordability, incremental densification, and cultural heritage, and in April 2021 was crucial in Toronto City Council’s designating Little Jamaica a Heritage Conservation District Under Study.

As SOCA grows, Laptiste and Cousins Wilson are eager for the challenge of scaling up their detail-oriented approach to larger projects—they recently worked on a proposal for reimagining Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts—with a team that expands beyond the two of them.

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1-3 After his grandmother’s passing, Tura Cousins Wilson redesigned her house to honour her legacy and accommodate the family’s next generation. A 5.8metre void was introduced in the centre of the house to introduce daylight and create visual connectivity between the floors. 4-6 Completed in collaboration with Andrew Chung, King West Loft transformed an open floor plan to add two bedrooms and an extra washroom. To conserve resources, the design refurbished and reused many existing elements, while strategically adding custom elements such as a bespoke L-shaped bench that doubles as a spatial divider.

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StudioAC JENNIFER KUDLATS, YU CHU SU, MATAI RAU, MO SOROOR, JONATHAN MIURA, ANDREW HILL TORONTO, ONTARIO

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While most practices believe in the power of collaboration, the singular vision of founders almost always results in a hierarchical assignment of creative, practical and intellectual power. To combat that tendency, StudioAC has conscientiously done away with a traditional org chart, breaking down barriers to expression and communication. Their full name—Studio for Architecture and Collaboration—commits the sixyear-old firm to this philosophy, and to a shared trust between skilled individuals with varied backgrounds and levels of experience.

“Designing the studio has been our most critical and ongoing project,” writes the team. “Our goal was to create a model that moved away from a figurehead and toward a collaborative atmosphere that was defined by the work created by the team, rather than by any individual.”

The influence of multiple voices gives StudioAC’s private and public works humanity and intimacy. The firm’s skilled organization of interior spaces, combination of linearity and openness in residences, and thoughtful solutions to small public spaces results from a deep understanding of what people require from their surroundings. They carefully study the functional and emotional responses architecture has on people as they live and interact within a space, and put their research into action.

For the owners of the Toronto home Beacs South, StudioAC transformed an existing semi-detached house into a refreshing, light-filled home—with a simplicity that belies the complex precision needed for the project. The central axis of the house was opened, doubling the

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ceiling height connecting the ground floor and second storey. Lighttoned wood, glass and natural light unify the interior, while the home owners move through both private and wide-open rooms with functional and psychological ease.

For Edition, a series of commercial spaces for a cannabis retailer, StudioAC created a set of folding forms that act as freestanding displays, service points, and wall art. The “retail sculptures” are made from off-the-shelf industrial grating—a material that the studio initially explored for an exhibition at the Design Exchange, marking their 2019 win of the RBC Canadian Emerging Designer competition. “This product has a unique self-supporting structural ability and an enticing visual quality that screens and filters light, producing moments of opacity/transparency depending on one’s vantage point,” they write. “These qualities, along with the material’s relative affordability, allow for larger design gestures to be executed within a modest budget.”

StudioAC’s model of equal responsibility across all architectural projects, is, in large part, behind these successes. “We look at the changing pace of the profession, fostering more inclusion, diversity, and strengthening young and growing voices as a trajectory,” say the co-founders on behalf of the studio. “And we believe the work that will result from that will hopefully be the future of Canadian architecture.”

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1 Edition St. Clair is one of a series of dispensaries created using offthe-shelf industrial grating, deployed in a kit-of-parts approach.

2 The studio first experimented with the material in an exhibition of their work at the Design Exchange, and reused the components for a public art installation several months later. 3 In Fairleigh, a triangular kitchen island invites interaction between the cook and guests sitting or standing at the counter. 4 Plywood built-ins give a contemporary identity to the Annex Hotel that balances with the building’s industrial history. 5 Beacs South is a dramatic, space-opening renovation to a semi-detached Victorian home in Toronto.

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Studio Shirshekar SANAZ SHIRSHEKAR ROTHESAY, NEW BRUNSWICK

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Sanaz Shirshekar’s story sounds almost like a movie premise: promising young architect builds her career at two bigtime firms (KPMB in Toronto and the New York office of interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg).

Then love and marriage take her to little Rothesay, New Brunswick, just east of Saint John. Her vision for Studio Shirshekar, the solo practice she establishes there, is “to bring affordable, accessible contemporary design to a historic Canadian region that is steeped in traditional design—and slow to embrace change.”

Around the time of her 2017 move to Atlantic Canada, family ties led to an extraordinary project. Her husband’s grandmother, philanthropist Jean Irving, grew up in rural Petitcodiac, N.B., where her grandfather was the pastor of the Baptist church. A 2016 heating oil leak had compromised the foundation of the oldest part of that church, a well-loved 1879 Gothic Revival building, necessitating its demolition. “Mrs. Irving paid for the entire remediation of the church and most of the reconstruction,” says Shirshekar, who designed the addition and renovation.

She was able to convince Mrs. Irving (who died in 2019) and the town that it was possible to commemorate the lost landmark without replicating it. Primarily a community hall, the new construction connects to a 1980s addition that served as the sanctuary even before the old building’s demolition. The massing, window distribution and wood siding of the new

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Fellowship Centre all recall the old church, but the new building is clearly of its own time. Its elemental, open-ended steeple frames the main entry, the old church’s bell, and a new illuminated cross that is visible throughout much of the town. Petitcodiac’s response to this sensitive addition and renovation has been overwhelmingly positive.

Studio Shirshekar remains a solo practice with some freelance support—its founder and her husband now have two young children and seek to balance their work and home lives. The studio has received several interior renovation commissions from University of New Brunswick Saint John. Although she’s now focusing on projects with much smaller budgets, lessons Sanaz Shirshekar learned earlier in her career are still applicable. For example, on the UNBSJ Whitebone Pizzeria project, millwork was the major expense, and it is no accident that the bar seating, banquettes and communal table are all set at dining height. “Glenn [Pushelberg] always said having all seating at dining height—including the bar—creates a harmonious dining experience,” says Shirshekar, laughing. “He said something to the effect of, ‘No one wants to look at someone else’s bum while they’re dining’, and that really stuck with me.”

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Completed with architect of record Des-Tec, the Petitcodiac Baptist Church pays homage to a demolished 1879 Gothic Revival building on the site. 3 A renovation to a University of New Brunswick Saint John computer lab uses colour to elevate the space on a modest budget.

4 The university’s Whitebone Pizzeria is centered on an open kitchen and artisanal pizza oven. 5 The competition-winning Facet-It Bike Hook was designed with Danielle Whitley, and produced as a prototype for the 2015 IIDEX Woodshop exhibition.

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Suulin Architects AMY LIN, JAMES CHAVEL, VALERIE ARTHUR, QINYU LU, DANIEL KASSEL, MICHEL PILON-BRIGGS, PIN HSIAO, AMBRENE MARGHOOB TORONTO, ONTARIO

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Suulin Architects is an emerging practice with an impressive back story. When its future principals met in New York City, Amy Lin was an associate working for Polshek Partnership (now Ennead Architects) on projects including the Clinton Library; James Chavel was at Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects working on the Phoenix Art Museum addition. Chavel wanted to return to his home in Toronto—together with Lin. Both had connections to Brigitte Shim of Shim-Sutcliffe: Chavel had been her teaching assistant at the University of Toronto and Shim had been Lin’s thesis reviewer at Harvard. They eventually served as co-project architects on Shim-Sutcliffe’s Sisters of St. Joseph residence/healthcare centre for the order’s elderly nuns. The project received a 2014 Governor General’s Medal in Architecture, and that same year, Lin and Chavel went out on their own, forming Suulin Architects.

The work of their firm—now eight people and growing—marries formal design rigour, sustainable design, urbanism, architecture and interior design suffused with nature. (The name “Suulin” derives from the Taiwanese word for “forest.”) One of their first projects, Office 31, combined selective demolition, renovation, and new construction to transform a disjointed North York warehouse complex into a cohesive, light-filled,

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multi-tenanted workplace with views to the property’s mature pine trees.

More recent projects range from House 152—an extensive renovation and addition to a Toronto home that introduces an HVAC-integrated green wall, triple glazing and many other sustainable features—to Maeli Market, a Taiwanese market that respectfully, joyfully evokes the island’s distinctive landscape and culture.

A major ongoing project is a mid-rise live/work rental building (888 Live-Work) at Ossington Avenue and Dupont Street in Toronto.

The building will replace a decayed former industrial building occupied by artists since the late 1980s. The project continues to be reshaped and redesigned through an iterative design process responding to City, client, and public feedback. Suulin Architects remains committed to realizing a mixed-use creative hub, with public spaces that will benefit the neighbourhood and provide opportunities for social engagement.

“Improving the urban environment is our main goal,” says Lin. Just as they strive to reconnect architecture and nature, “We’re always looking for opportunities, no matter how small, to bridge private and public.”

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House 152 is an extensive renovation and addition that intertwines new and old to create a vibrant home for a family of five. 3-4 The design for Maeli Market aims to evoke the natural topography and landscapes of Taiwan, as well as the country’s renowned night markets. 5-7 Office 31 is a gut renovation and addition to an existing warehouse building.

Instead of the outdoor access to tenant spaces typical of surrounding buildings, the architects convinced the owner to create a brightly daylit shared atrium space.

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UOAI STANISLAV JURKOVIĆ, VIS SANKRITHI, EVELINE LAM, MICHAEL MARZURKIEWICZ TORONTO, ONTARIO

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1 A palette of elemental materials and bright colours is used to organize café, retail, and repair zones at Fix Coffee and Bikes in Toronto.

2 Archival photographs documenting the 1958 City Hall design competition were used to create an integrated artwork ringing the Nathan Phillip’s Square Bicycle Station. 3-4 House Withrow’s details include a shower daringly overlooking the stairwell, and a window well inset in the kitchen counter. 5 Set within an 1860s coach house, the House Studio strategically uses void spaces to introduce light to the groundfloor studio. The project was completed in collaboration with Piccaluga Design Inc. 6 Located on Toronto’s College Street, The Blue Room uses colour to suggest an interior space.

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The founding principals of Uoai (pronounced “wai” / “y” / “why”), Stanislav Jurković and Vis Sankrithi, met while teaching architecture design studio at Ryerson University. For five years, while running solo practices, they were frequent collaborators, so by 2019, it felt natural to formally come together as a duo.

Uoai is founded on a desire for approaching design without any preconceived notions attached to typology or program. Even the firm’s name—which doesn’t have a particular linguistic reference—points towards this goal.

To date, Jurković and Sankrithi have been able to run Toronto-based Uoai as a non-specialized studio. “By shifting scales, programs and strategies, the intent is to open up new opportunities and ply them forward.

[It is] also to keep us interested and thinking in broader ways with each successive project,” says Jurković. Enjoying the challenge of operating on “uncomfortable grounds” has resulted in a body of work consisting of public art installations, private residences, a growing institutional and commercial portfolio, and even some small industrial design projects.

Uoai’s open-ended approach to design is also informed by the pair’s continued connection to academia. They believe teaching undergraduate students is one of the ways they’re able to “keep our energy alive,” says Jurković, continually “questioning our judgments and criticizing our normal assumptions.”

Jurković and Sankrithi’s interest in questioning spatial conventions is perhaps most evident in their public art projects, where they can test out ideas more freely. In their installation The Blue Room, the duo responds to Toronto’s “infinite grid and the inability to escape the street” in its urban fabric, says Jurković. Light projections, street furniture, and areas denoted by blue create a “room” within the street realm that criticizes “the lack of interiority in public space.”

Such ideas also inform the firm’s architectural designs. In their private residences, Uoai’s exploration of spatial contradictions frequently translates into the blurring of public and private distinctions. This is perhaps most evident in House Withrow, where a glass-enclosed shower is on prominent display above the main stair.

At the Nathan Phillips Square Bicycle Station, underneath Toronto City Hall, Uoai deftly layers spaces. The bicycle parking area is ringed by a series of glass and printed panels that showcase the 513 competition entries for the design of Toronto City Hall in 1958. This archival material contributes a historical and global reading of the site, literally placed at its foundations—a space that could have easily been left as a nondescript garage. “By superimposing a highly curated display of imagery onto infrastructural spaces, we explored the potential of setting the everyday utilitarian experience against the backdrop of a pivotal historic moment,” says Sankrithi.

Jurković and Sankrithi are currently collaborating with PMA Landscape Architects on The Dance, a public artwork in celebration of LGBTQ2S+ history at George Hislop Park in Toronto, and hope to extend their examination and questioning of spatial conditions to larger-scale institutional projects as they grow in their practice.

Paniz Moayeri

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Created as part of GEC Architecture’s bid to design the Jasper Place Transit Centre for the City of Edmonton, two analysis diagrams show the current infrastructural elements to be consolidated in the new centre, along with the anticipated circulation paths around the new building.

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PROCURING CHANGE TEXT

Jake Nicholson

HOW CAN CURRENT RFP PROCESSES BE IMPROVED TO YIELD BETTER OUTCOMES—BOTH FOR ARCHITECTURE AND FOR ARCHITECTS?

When emerging architecture firms begin to scale up to larger projects, it often means plunging into the world of publicly posted Requests for Proposals (RFPs). These competitions are a requirement for organizations in the public sector, as a means of ensuring fairness and transparency on taxpayer-backed projects. They are also used by a broad range of client types to find architects for important buildings—hospitals, schools, civic centres, academic buildings, museums, and libraries— to name only a few.

For somebody looking through the list of interested firms for any significantly sized RFP, the globalized nature of architecture as a business becomes clear very quickly. Large firms from urban centres all over Canada are usually interested, and it is not uncommon to also see firms from the United States and overseas. No matter who you are, to participate in this process on multi-million-dollar budgeted projects likely means to compete with behemoths—firms staffed with hundreds of people, equipped with multi-person marketing teams and with portfolios that span the globe.

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To say the workload these pursuits place on the industry is “burdensome” would be a serious understatement. The procurement phase for larger-scale projects is often a months-long, multi-phased affair. A qualifying round can see as many as 50 different firms submitting for the project: imagine a 20-page limit on qualifying submissions, and then imagine 1,000+ pages pouring onto a client’s desk at one minute before deadline. Weeks later, a smaller number of firms then pre-qualify for a more labour-intensive second round. Then there might be interviews.

There could be travel involved at every step. The work involved for everybody is tremendous and it costs a lot of money. You may also be asked to provide services well outside of typical architectural scope.

If you choose to chase an RFP, the statistical likelihood is that you will lose. Lose early in the process, and you feel personally hurt that you did not make the cut. Lose late, and you may have spent thousands of dollars on a fruitless pursuit. Then there is the debrief process, where you may learn that the person evaluating submissions knows little about architecture and misunderstood something critical about your submission. The successful candidate goes on to design a building that stands as a monument to the time you failed. There is more than one of these monuments in your city. You may pass by a couple on your way to work.

The raw workload—all of it overhead—can prove prohibitive, especially for smaller firms. Yet despite all this genuine pain, the procurement process is an important means of access for designing some stellar projects and (critically) for meeting new clients.

Toon Dreessen is founder of Ottawa-based Architects DCA, a past president of the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), and an outspoken advocate for changing procurement practices for architecture in Canada. He thinks that current procurement practices are “fundamentally broken.” “This is really a matter of public interest,” says Dreessen.

“Unfair procurement processes harm small businesses, and their negative impact on the built environment lasts for generations. That’s something that the public needs to better understand.”

Dreessen has a long list of issues with procurement practices. Among them: he believes that they remove dialogue between clients and prospective architects that would improve projects, they inherently skew in favour of larger firms, they stifle innovation by keeping people from asking questions (lest they lose a competitive advantage), and they ultimately create a focus on low fees that has become so prevalent that it is damaging Canada’s architecture. Asked if there was one thing he feels it is important for procurement professionals to understand, he says: “Ultimately fees don’t matter. We spend too much time and effort arguing about fees, when we really need to be arguing about quality.“ Dreessen noted that most architecture firms in Ontario are small, with only one licensed architect. “These firms don’t participate in this public procurement process because they can’t. They can’t get their foot in the door […] They can’t win these big projects, and when I talk about big projects, I’m talking about a ten, fifteen, twenty-milliondollar project. That’s totally manageable by a small firm of five people.”

“That means that really big firms are the only ones left at the table, and they’re fighting to get even those relatively small projects, let alone the huge ones.”

Dreessen has argued for design competitions as a better approach, saying that they provide a place to foster innovation and for firms to stand on the strength of their ideas. They likewise offer a chance for even the losers to grow their portfolio. Dreessen has also advocated for more

2021-07-21 12:32 PM

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quality-based evaluation, as opposed to evaluation based on fee.

He suggests that procurement needs to remain fair, while also making room for “conversation” between architect and client.

“If we agreed on fairness—and the concept of fairness—we wouldn’t have fee-based RFPs. We would agree on what a fair fee is, and we would agree on what a reasonable compensation is, and we wouldn’t leave it to a race to the bottom,” says Dreessen. “If all things are equal, it should be a meritocracy. It should be that the person who gets the job is the best qualified for it, or has the most creative solution in a competition format. That should be the deciding factor.”

Others in Canada have even gone so far as to implement a different approach to procurement for architectural services. The City of Edmonton stands out as a case study—not just because of their unique practices, but because of the design-minded politics that led them there.

In 2005, Edmonton’s then-mayor Stephen Mandel famously said in a state-of-the-city address: “The time has passed when square boxes with minimal features and lame landscaping are acceptable. Our tolerance for crap is now zero.”

Since that time, Edmonton has become more and more qualityminded in how it evaluates architects submitting proposals to design City projects. It is also unique in having a City Architect on staff.

For the past decade and a half, Carol Bélanger has worked to refine Edmonton’s procurement practices for architectural services. “At the time I started my position, we used to do ‘call-ups’, but these were by invitation only,” says Bélanger. “So, you would call up three firms or four firms, to be ‘competitive.’ It was limited by who you knew.”

Influenced by provincial trade agreements that required more projects to be put out for public bid—as well as by the publicly stated desire to do away with “crap”—the City changed how it evaluated architects submitting to design its larger projects. It eventually moved to a twophased submission and evaluation process. The first is a qualifying phase to create a shortlist of architects identified as being able to complete the work; the second phase consists of an RFP process for these pre-qualified candidates, as well as an interview for finalists. This process was designed to limit the raw work of proposal-writing on the

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ABOVE Located at one of Edmonton’s busiest bus hubs, GEC’s finished Jasper Place Transit Centre includes a generous roof, shaped to welcome pedestrians and encourage consistent use of the facility.

industry at large, while still having an RFP process that focussed— in detail—on the project at hand.

“Once they know they are shortlisted, then we can put out the fullblown RFP,” says Bélanger, adding that the second phase of Edmonton’s RFP process includes the pre-qualified candidates’ vision for the project. “We ask for a vision. Not a design, but a vision: from an urban design point of view, how would you meet this context?”

Perhaps most importantly, Edmonton changed how they evaluated architectural fees. The fee component of their RFP process is rated as 10% of the overall scoring for the submission—very low compared to other governments and public agencies, who often rate fees at 30% or more of a total RFP score. Moreover, the City also works according to fee recommendations established by the province’s professional associations, the Alberta Association of Architects and the Consulting Architects of Alberta. This has the effect of making the expected fee for the project clear to all potential submitters from the outset, and already in-line with professional expectations for what is necessary to deliver good work.

“We’re not allowing firms to ‘buy’ the work with a low fee. But at the same time, being in a municipality, we’re still cognizant of having a limited budget. We’re not just going to pay exorbitant fees,” says Bélanger. “For the most part, unless somebody misunderstands something, we’ve always seen people get full marks on the core fee.”

What has followed from these changes? “The outcome has been nothing short of amazing,” says Bélanger. City of Edmonton projects have been celebrated with four RAIC Governor General’s Awards since 2018: achieved for Borden Park Natural Swimming Pool, T he Rea l Time Cont rol Bu i ld ing #3, Borden Park Pavilion (all by gh3*), and the South Haven Centre for Remembrance (by SHAPE Architecture with PECHET Studio and Group 2 Architects). Says Bélanger, “We’re not doing the work for awards, but the awards are a good indicator from a design excellence perspective.”

2021-07-21 12:32 PM

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to be Massing Sensitive to Residential Context: Move Situated to be Sensitive to Residential massing closer to Whyte Ave towall, massing closer to WhyteContext: Ave. tomove create a continuous street create a continuous street wall, while providing while providing better privacy for adjacent residents. better privacy for adjacent residents.

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several City of Edmonton supportive housing Enhance Connection to the Park: the building projects, GEC Architects indicates about the potential has theinitial ability tothoughts interact with the park, providing residents and park users alike. for the buildings to connect to benefit their for surroundings.

Public reception to the projects has also been positive, says Bélanger, N noting that memberships to related civic organizations are up. The new buildings show up regularly on social media. It is even an issue which hasUtilize Massing to Create Micro Climate: this provides ample space for healing gardens been put on the ballot in Edmonton’s 2013 civic election: one mayoral site that could also be utilized as a winter garden to Utilize Massing to Create Micro Climate: this celebrate Edmonton’s climate. candidate decried “Taj Mahal” rec centres, and garnered relatively little including the performance or responsibilities the authorities site provides ample of space for client, healing gardens that could also be utilized as a winter garden to support. It turns out people liked design-forward civic buildings and saw having jurisdiction, or the contractor.” celebrate Edmonton’s climate.

Existing Pedestrian Connections: there the value in what the City was doing. Mandel and Bélanger both earn Strengthen There are other important issues beyond sorting out who-does-what. is an existing goat trail that leads to surrounding These should and be enhanced can Strengthen mention in the book Canadian Modern Architecture, 1967 to the present, bus stops.“This lackremain of understanding also impact to design an there appropriExistinghow Pedestrian Connections: where possible. is an existing goat trail that leads to surrounding with educator Graham Livesey writing that they sparked an “architecturate evaluation tool / criteria for selecting the right professional for the bus stops. These should remain and be enhanced al renaissance” with their procurement practices, resulting in “a spectacuparticular project you may have.”where Thepossible.

OAA’s statement also raised lar series of public projects, mainly by out-of-province firms.” issues of RFPs that include work impossible to cover under mandatory It is worth examining procurement carefully if an “architectural renprofessional insurance. aissance” that is also popular with the public can stem from changes The OAA advocates for Qualifications-Based Selection (QBS), to a city’s RFP practices. which recommends that clients select the most qualified firm to design the work and negotiate a fee afterwards. The OAA website likens the There is a lot that RFPs determine before proposals are submitted.

In the process of creating an RFP, potential clients of architects—often process to a company hiring a new staff member first, and then negotiating their salary after. This approach differs from the City of Edmonthe staff of public agencies—determine criteria from the outset for who ton’s, but it is still a step outside of the norm for most public RFP can bid on their projects. This entails making value judgements about what is important in designing the potential building, and what type requirements, which require a fee to be declared as part of the submisof architect will be the best choice to design the project. Often, a culture sion process. The matter of how—and when—architectural fees are of risk aversion creates a preference for firms who have done similar decided has serious implications for how much the architect eventually work in the past: much of the time, you can’t apply to design a building gets paid. That, in turn, impacts the scope of service that an architect like a library if you haven’t already designed some pre-determined can reasonably deliver, while still surviving as a business. number of them. There is also the issue of how design teams are evaluEvery facet of procurement invites questions with complex answers, ated, and who does the evaluation. To what extent do client representaand the processes by which we buy something are intimately connected tives understand architecture? To what extent should they? with the product we receive. In the case of architecture, the product Asked about issues with RFPs and procurement, the OAA respond­ being purchased carries long-term planning implications and large environmental impacts, and it informs the look and function of the builded with a written statement, including the following: “Among the most ings we use every day. It is critical for potential clients to take time for common issues are requirements that do not ref lect a correct underinterrogation, education, and introspection in their approach. standing of the Architect or Licensed Technologist OAA’s role, resulting in OAA members being expected to take on tasks that are the responsibility of others. The result might mean an architect finding Jake Nicholson is a writer based in London, Ontario, with extensive experience workthemselves responsible for activities and outcomes they do not control, ing on proposals for architectural and engineering firms.

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Carpen

Training to Clad it Right the First Time Carpenters and Allied Workers Local 27, United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, in conjunction with our contractor partners and field leaders, and with the assistance of the College of Carpenters, has developed a premier Exterior Cladding training program to provide real-world hands-on training to installers and industry professionals. This course was developed to address an increasing demand in the industry for skilled workers to install these products.

This course will provide training to our broader membership on how to properly install various architectural panels/exterior cladding, including Insulated Metal Panels (IMPs) and Aluminum Composite Materials (ACMs), using the most up-to-date technologies and techniques.

The six-day course will include a two-day certification course for Elevated Work Platforms and swing stages and a four-day course teaching the best practices for the installation of exterior cladding.

For our inaugural session in March of 2021, four journeymen instructors were provided training on how to install exterior cladding, including IMPs and ACMs. The materials were generously donated by Riverside Group Ltd. These instructors will now travel to the Carpenters’ Union Training Centres across the province to ensure that each training centre will be teaching this course to UBCJA members.

If you have any questions about this exciting course, please contact Paul Daly (Local 27 Coordinator) or Darren Sharpe (UBCJA Cladding Coordinator) at 905-652-4140.

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Carpenters ad.indd CA Aug 21.indd 77 1

@ carpenters27 2021-04-0812:32 3:03PM PM 2021-07-21

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WARMING HUTS: A DECADE + OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE ON ICE Edited by Lawrence Bird, Peter Hargraves and Sharon Wohl (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2021) REVIEW Elsa Lam

In the winter of 1992, a skating trail opened on Winnipeg’s frozen Assiniboine River, lined with discarded Christmas trees. The cleared ice eventually expanded to include hockey rinks and curling sheets, and fifteen years later, the skating trail had grown to rival Ottawa’s Rideau Canal.

Around that time, a group of local architects came up with the idea of building a series of artistically designed shelters on the ice. Local firms 5468796, Sputnik, and 701 Architecture built huts alongside the skating trail the next winter. Nova Scotia architect Richard Kroeker also created a hut—and so did Antoine Predock, the architect for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights being constructed nearby.

Warming Huts would grow into an international design competition, attracting nearly 1,500 submissions to-date from around the world. The program has included invited contributions by the likes of the Patkaus, Frank Gehry, and Anish Kapoor alongside projects designed by local architecture students from the University of Manitoba. Each year, previous huts are re-installed when possible, making for a rich collection of wintertime pavilions that’s earned the city bucket-list status in the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Fodor’s.

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ABOVE Created for the 2011 edition of the Warming Huts festival, Patkau Architects’ Jellyfish pavilion was made by bending thin, flexible layers of plywood to their breaking point over a timber armature.

“Over the past ten years, the Warming Huts competition has encouraged millions of people to skate the River Trail and engage with art,” writes Peter Hargraves, one of the initial organizers of the initiative, and a co-editor of the new book Warming Huts: A Decade + of Art and Architecture on Ice. “The Warming Huts is now an integral part of [the] celebration of winter in the city.”

Anishnabek writer, scholar and activist Niigaan Sinclair opens the volume, commenting on the Indigenous significance of the Warming Huts’ site, a crossroads of trade, meeting and negotiation for over 6,000 years. Some of the installations—notably, invited contributions by Innu throat singer Tanya Tagaq and Métis architect Étienne Gaboury—refer to this deep history. But Sinclair sees untapped possibilities for future warming huts to connect more strongly to the Indigenous legacies of the site: “the resilience, the inclusivity, and the fact that thousands of nations and communities have been here for a very long time and created every part of the city around us.”

The area—now known as The Forks—was, in pre-colonial times, “one of the most important political spaces in North America,” says Cree

2021-07-21 12:32 PM

CA Awa

NOW OPEN FOR ENTRIES Deadline: September 16th, 2021

CANADIAN ARCHITECT INVITES ARCHITECTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS TO ENTER THE 2021 AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE Architecture project entry fee: $175 *

Architectural photo entry fee: $75 *

Since 1967, our annual national awards program recognizes the architectural excellence of projects in the design and construction phases.

Submissions will be accepted in PDF format, up to 12 pages with dimensions no greater than 11” x 17”.

Total file size is not to exceed 25MB. There is also the option to submit a video up to two minutes in length.

This year, we are also presenting the fourth edition of the Canadian Architect Photo Awards of Excellence, open to professional and amateur architectural photographers.

Winners of the architectural project and architectural photo competitions will be published in a special issue of Canadian Architect in December 2021.

For more details and to submit your entry, visit: www.canadianarchitect.com/awards

IMAGE: TAZA WATER RESERVOIR AT TAZA PARK, PHASE 1, TSUUT’INA NATION. DESIGN BY ZEIDLER ARCHITECTURE. WINNER OF A 2020 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

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curator Kevin Brownlee. When Europeans arrived in the 17th century, comments architect Lawrence Bird, the country’s waterways continued to be a focus of development. The watery highways were critical for transporting beaver pelts, and later for moving people and goods. But with the arrival of the railway, new patterns of inhabitation came to dominate over the Prairies—a change most visible in the way that the Métis long-lot farms, oriented to the rivers, were replaced by a uniform grid to apportion land. “As Winnipeg moved into the 20th century, a cage of railway tracks, yards, and bridges was built around the Forks,” writes Bird. Eventually, as the construction of the 1968 Red River Floodway further tamed the Red and Assiniboine and residents moved to the suburbs, “the rivers became something you could ignore.”

The Warming Huts initiative is intertwined with a relatively recent reclamation of the Forks and an interest in the urban revitalization of downtown Winnipeg. Architectural professor Sharon Wohl notes how such projects, initiated in cities across North America in the mid-80s to mid-90s, have often been criticized for catering to an elite audience. The Forks is different, she writes: “Rather than providing exclusive amenities for the wealthy, the Forks’ management assures a continuous array of free events, and provides site amenities appealing to an inner-city youth population that is both at-risk and marginalized.”

The Warming Huts are effective placemaking devices, adds planner Hazel Borys, “offering human-scaled civic anchors.” As architectural critic Lisa Rochon puts it, works such as the Warming Huts “reside as points of light in our vast urban galaxy.”

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ABOVE Germany-based NAICE Architecture & Design’s Hoverbox (2019) floats on steel supports, camouflaged by clothing. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Open Border (2017) is Dutch firm Atelier ARI’s vision of a wall meant to be breached; Guy Maddin’s The Temple of Lost Things was created with Peter Hargraves and Luca Roncoroni; Nuzzles (2014) was created from foam noodles by Toronto-based RAW in collaboration with Kim Flynn.

For several of the essayists, the most interesting of the Warming Huts are those that have alluded to larger political and social issues.

Coinciding with the 2017 election of Donald Trump, the Dutch team Atelier ARI installed Open Border, a skate-through double-row of soft red plastic strips spanning the river. Cloud of Unintended Consequences, built by University of Manitoba architecture students in collaboration with artist Eleanor Bond in 2020, presents a troubling image: a f loating mass made out of plastic waste. A taxonomy of over 1,000 competition entries, compiled at the end of the book, includes dozens of additional unbuilt pavilion designs tacking political, social, and environmental issues.

Can a set of architectural installations on Winnipeg’s frozen rivers make a difference, in the face of these issues? “While projects like the Warming Huts cannot solve such problems,” writes Sharon Wohl, “the building of inclusive spaces for dialogue within the framework of the city is an important step along the way.”

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AN INSTALLATION IN GRAND MÉTIS, QUEBEC, CELEBRATES THE END OF LOCKDOWN MEASURES BY BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN INDOOR AND OUTDOOR SPACE. Two days after the 2021 International Garden Festival at Quebec’s Jardins de Métis opened at the end of June, the entire province of Quebec was declared a green zone: the lowest level on the province’s Covid alert scale. The change came after Quebec had seen some of Canada’s toughest and longest lockdown measures, including 139 days of a nightly curfew that shuttered the province’s typically lively nightlife between 8 pm and 5 am.

It’s hard to imagine a more beautiful symbol for the beginning of reopening than one of the competition-winning installations that is part of this year’s Festival. Open Space is designed by three young, Quebec-based intern architects—Gabriel Lemelin, Francis Gaignard, Sandrine Gaulin, who work together under the name Legaga. Set within the Jardin de Métis’ spacious grounds, the walls of a small, potentially confining house are bursting apart and tilting toward the ground, not just blurring the boundary between indoor and outdoor space, but obliterating it.

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“Since the beginning of Covid-19, our homes, normally places of intimacy and leisure, became associated with confinement, fear, sometimes even anguish,” explains Lemelin. “With our proposal, we wanted to instil a feeling of hope and joy. We took a small, 11-by-8-foot room and opened its walls to the surroundings. Suddenly, the whole domesticscape is transformed in a playground open to new interpretation and uses.”

The house, including a fireplace and a set of stairs surreally lying on their sides, are pigmented bright blue. The colour echoes one of the most iconic flowers at the Jardin de Métis— the Himalayan blue poppies that are difficult to grow outside of their original, east Asian habitat. It also underscores how special it can be to escape a long confinement. “By using a bright and saturated colour, we wanted to create a mental distance between the installation and all the other wooden decks that can be found outside,” says Lemelin. “Thus, the monochrome installation contrasts with the surrounding landscape, creating a magical strangeness.”

In one of five new installations at the 2021 International Garden Festival, the walls of a house burst open, unfolding to the ground.

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Beyond the finished product, the process of designing and building the installation was likewise influenced by the pandemic. “We were ourselves in lockdown when we designed Open Space,” says Lemelin. “Being constantly on a computer for work, social life and leisure made us want to take a step back from this virtual environment. Therefore, we worked almost exclusively in physical models.” The switch to the tactile helped the team think early on about the process of completing the construction on-site, in under a week, using standard dimension lumber. For that, Legaga engaged a group of volunteers.

“There is something poetic about the whole design and construction process,” says Lemelin. “The room with the fallen walls actually permitted us to reunite with our friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in a year-and-a-half due to the lockdown. It was just like when we could invite them into our own homes again.”

Matthew Hague is a Toronto-based design and architecture writer.

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