Medicine Chest: In Vancouver, a new campus building for pharmaceutical studies conceived by Gilles Saucier makes a bold statement while reshaping its context.
Iconic designs don't always make good places. Photogenic buildings that assert themselves as individual landmarks may ignore their context and fail to enhance the public realm.
On the main thoroughfare through the commercial district of Winnipeg, Manitoba, a series of metal boxes protrudes from the 1904 facade of the Avenue Building like a cluster of Donald Judd sculptures bursting from the windows.
One of the fastest-growing places in North America, Vaughan, 14 miles north of Toronto, has morphed from a rural township of 16,000 people in 1960 to a sprawling suburb of 288,000 today.
A two-story, 50,590-square-foot public K–7 elementary school with classrooms, offices, a prekindergarten, special education classrooms, a computer lab, a library, a gymnasium with a stage, and an adult literacy center serving the community.
Instead of the boxlike apartment and commercial towers in cities everywhere, architect Yansong Ma, principal of Beijing-based MAD, prefers structures that are “organic and soft.”
Program: A 480,000-square-foot mixed-use office and commercial complex spanning a city block in downtown Kitchener. The project transforms a defunct tannery into a hub for the area's growing technology sector, with office tenants including Communitech and Google, public courtyards and event space, a health clinic, and workspace for local artisans, among them a photographer and a cabinet maker. Design concept and solution: Seeking to bridge Kitchener's industrial heritage and its recent tech-sector activity, the RAWdesign team wanted to streamline the site's maze of buildings and add-ons without uprooting the existing artisan-tenants. RAW preserved the masonry shell and divided the site