Patkau Architects

Architecture and PlanningCanada11-50 Employees

Patkau Architects, founded in 1978 by John and Patricia Patkau, is a Canadian architecture and design research practice led by four principals, three senior associates, and two associates, all supported by a team of architects, designers, and administrative staff.

Working together with shared goals and ideas developed over the past 47 years, this team has led the studio on a great diversity of projects. Their portfolio comprises art installations and furniture, houses, medium-scaled community buildings, and major urban buildings. The commitment to the search for 'found potential' - those aspects of place, culture, and its people that can be gathered into an architectural form evocative of locale, circumstance, history, and landscape - is the through-line that distinguishes their work.

Patkau Architects also apply the search for found potential to materials themselves, looking for new ways to shape and combine familiar materials to explore new possibilities and applications. A guiding principle in this work is 'material + force = form', where form is simultaneously material, space and structure. Their studio’s design lab tests these ideas at full scale, both in-house and in workshops around Vancouver, conducting experiments that inform and inspire their building-scale work. Patkau Architects Material Operations, their most recent book, is a compendium of these research innovations (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017).

Deriving from this combination of architecture and research, Patkau Studio has emerged as a way to bring their deep fascination with materials, form, and craft into greater focus and accessibility.  Art and furniture ideas often emerge concurrently with architectural designs. Each piece develops out of an experimental process by which every detail is considered and refined, the design evolving through making. Their aim is to enrich spaces with elegant and articulate objects that invite visual, tactile, and emotional engagement, all made in-house.

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