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The App leton House, designed in 1985 for a site on Victoria Island,, was,for a young family with three small children . They showed us photographs of lofts in New York and industrial buildings and said, "This is the house that we want." The materiality of th e images t hey showed us was completely impossible on their budget. The on ly thing which was feasible was wood frame construction, and so we decided to try to transform wood frame constru ction to represent the more substantia l qualities of the images they had se lected. We began by organ izing the plan about a single large two-story room. All other rooms were simply placed in a lin e behind t his large space. Within the large room we created a few elements wh ich we came to call 'totemic' elements. Our idea was to keep most parts of the house to conventional proportions. In th e context of this normal world we introduced one giant room, one giant column and one giant fireplace. These totem ic figures, even though made of conventiona l construction, were t o stand for the robust material and arch itectural presence which the clients had described. Fo r Seab ird Island School, t he found potential was revea led in studies of both the site andl the client. Th is school for a Salish Indian Bandl is on a large delta in the middle of the Fraser River at the point where the river valley disappears into t he coastal mountain range . The site is an agricultural area with large fields and a wooded perimeter where the ind ividua l dwe llings of the band members are located . To the sou th of th e site the re is a modest town center, au-shaped configu ration of bu ildin gs loose ly grouped around a small gree n.