Issued For Construction

In part two, Richard Kroeker picks up where he left off and goes deeper into the ideas behind his life’s work. He explains why the Architectural Association, a school founded and still run by its students, left him asking why every university doesn’t work that way, and how that conviction turned his Dalhousie studios into research teams producing work for real communities rather than grades destin...

Richard Kroeker grew up on a Manitoba farm near a small prairie village, one of five boys in a home where canning season, butchering bees and hay crews were shared community work. His father, a Ukrainian immigrant who worked as a bricklayer, plumber, carpenter and mechanic, told his sons that their heads were their future. Richard set out to be a naturalist, drawing and painting everything he obse...

Jamie grew up in Cedarvale, the youngest of three sisters, with summers at the family cottage on Lake Simcoe. By her own account she was a serial quitter of piano, guitar and dance, but she never stopped making things, from beading and painting to bedazzling, and she still remembers the hot pink and orange Ikea haul that made decorating her bedroom feel like a turning point. A psychology degree fr...

Place of Work is an architecture studio with one foot in Halifax and one in Toronto, founded by Jennifer Esposito, Duncan Patterson, and Will Perkins. The three first worked together at MacKay Lyons Sweetapple Architects, and when COVID shook everything loose they realized a practice built on trust and shared shorthand could live in two cities. Today they design mostly houses, with a deep interest...

Michelle grew up in Richmond, BC, the daughter of Australian parents who made sure she was born a proud Canadian, and she has rarely stood still since. Ballet started at two, followed by the French horn, the trumpet, basketball as a point guard, and a string of provincial titles in the 800, 1500 and 3000 metres. Her first business lessons came from rolling coins at her parents’ laundromat and rest...

Pina and Ralph have been partners in life and architecture since a prom date arranged by a cousin. Ralph showed up for that first date and mistook Pina's twin sister for her, a mix up that still gets retold. Both grew up in Italian Canadian families steeped in building and craft. Ralph comes from three generations of builders, and Pina spent childhood summers in Italy touring history with her...

At eight years old, Jonathan was driving a truck out to the fields with snacks for the crew on his grandparents' 400 acre Idaho farm. Garrett was a Newport Beach kid decorating his bedroom like a beach house inside a craftsman home. Today the married duo run BrewerSweet Co., a full service interior design studio in Southern California with a growing footprint in Park City, Utah. Jonathan's...

David Arnott is the founder and principal of Stark Architecture and Interiors, a 24-person studio based in Squamish, BC. Originally from Peebles, a small town south of Edinburgh, Scotland, he grew up immersed in competitive cycling — his father was a Scottish national road racing champion — before discovering architecture through family trips to churches and buildings across mainland Europe. He co...

Cynthia Soda is the founder and principal designer of Soda Pop Design, a multidisciplinary interior design and build firm serving mid to high end residential clients across the Greater Toronto Area. Cynthia is NCIDQ certified and registered with ARIDO, and studied interior design at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University). Cynthia's path to design began early: she grew up watc...

Susan and David Scott are the founders of Scott & Scott Architects, a Vancouver based practice launched in 2012. They met as architecture students at the Technical University of Nova Scotia, later Dalhousie University, completing a Bachelor of Environmental Design and a Master of Architecture in 2000. Susan grew up in Vancouver's Kitsilano and Dunbar area, camping across British Columbia each...

Tara Fingold is the founder and principal designer of Tara Fingold Interiors (TFI Design Group), a Toronto residential design studio she established in the late 1990s. Tara grew up in the city, the daughter of an English immigrant who built his own contracting business from nothing, and she spent her childhood tagging along on his job sites, absorbing how he managed trades, clients, and a small te...

Greg is a partner at Patkau Architects in Vancouver, one of Canada's most internationally recognized architecture practices. Born and raised on Vancouver's North Shore, Greg came to architecture by an unconventional path: he first completed a philosophy degree, worked through a career counseling process, and only decided to pursue architecture after visiting the Seabird Island School and speaking...

Joel Loblaw is the founder and principal of Joel Loblaw Inc., a Toronto based landscape design and build studio launched in 2011, and a longtime friend of the show. Born in Chicago, Joel moved to Toronto with his family at age five and grew up in the city's Beaches neighbourhood, where camping trips to Algonquin Park starting at age ten rooted a lifelong connection to the outdoors, one he still re...

Will is the National Director of IDS (Interior Design Show), Canada's leading design show, spanning editions in Toronto and Vancouver. Born and raised in North London, Will grew up immersed in the design world. His parents founded a corporate identity studio that grew from a handful of people to roughly 250 employees, working with clients like British Airways and Royal Mail, with offices in London...

Sean Lawrence is a founding partner of Kohn Partnership Architects (KPA), a Toronto-based practice he established in 2002 alongside, the now retired, Harry Kohn. Born and raised in Toronto, Sean traces his interest in architecture to childhood, when his family commissioned a country home from a Toronto architect and he watched an idea move from sketch to built reality. He began his architectural s...

Tim Ng is the founder and CEO of AdHoc Studio, one of the top rendering and visualization companies in North America, and the founder of Blackline, a leading sales and marketing CRM platform built for the new development and pre-construction industry. Born and raised in Toronto's North York neighbourhood, Tim grew up immersed in real estate. His father was among the first pre-construction condomin...

Elaine Molinar is a Partner and Managing Director for the Americas at Snøhetta, the international architecture, landscape, and design practice. Born in El Paso, Texas, she grew up in a household shaped by craft and problem solving. Her father, a pharmacist, was also a self taught woodworker and photographer, and her grandfather had worked in a railroad steel yard, building his own tools. Her mothe...

Colette van den Thillart is an interior designer born in Orangeville, Ontario, who grew up in Mississauga. She traces her passion for design to childhood, including a bedroom she designed herself at six or seven, with grass green shag carpet, daisy wallpaper, and yellow curtains, later recreated and shared on Instagram. She began her career after a two year diploma at the International Academy in...

Daniel Baumann and Vanessa Kassabian are the two leaders running Henning Larsen's New York studio, and their combined story runs from childhood living rooms all the way to construction sites around the world. Vanessa grew up in a matriarchal household in San Antonio and Houston, patching drywall and hanging blinds long before she ever set foot in a drafting class. That class, in middle school, was...

Emma and Darcy are the founding principals of & Daughters, a Vancouver based architecture and interior design studio established nearly a decade ago. The two met during their first week in the Master of Architecture program at the University of British Columbia's School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, where a shared preference for desks near natural light placed them side by side i...

Thomas Gluck was born in New York City and grew up immersed in architecture. His father, Peter Gluck, graduated from Yale in 1962 and founded the practice now known as GLUCK+ in 1972. As a child, Tom watched his father build models out of basswood and cardboard. His mother taught modern Japanese history at Columbia University, and the family lived in Tokyo for periods during his childhood. At sixt...

Sheree Stuart is the founder and principal of Sheree Stuart Design, a boutique interior design studio based in Toronto. Raised in Kilworth, a small community outside London, Ontario, Sheree began her career as a Chartered Professional Accountant with Deloitte, where she spent years working in strategy for the firm's global middle market initiative, traveling extensively across Europe, Asia, and No...

Kim Yao is a principal of Architecture Research Office, a New York City firm she joined in 1997, later becoming partner. Born in Portland, Oregon, she grew up in nearby Lake Oswego, the youngest of three children of a pediatric neurologist who immigrated from the Philippines and a nurse of Irish descent. She played soccer and basketball and rowed in college before discovering architecture at Colum...

Born in Toronto and the eldest of three girls, Kim grew up between an orthopaedic surgeon father and an artist mother, a pairing she credits for both her creative instinct and her exacting standards. She earned an honours degree from Queen's University, where she studied politics and wrote a thesis on peacekeeping, then spent nine months travelling and diving through New Zealand, Australia and Sou...

Christine Lolley is the principal and co-founder of Solares Architecture, a residential architecture practice in Toronto. She grew up in Puslinch Township, south of Guelph, Ontario, the daughter of a family doctor and a father who built a software company for the equipment rental industry. She has an older sister, Sarah, and a younger brother, Peter. Christine studied architecture at the Universit...