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IN A YEAR WHEN much modernist-inspired architecture in the West started to look quietly the same, one emerging team stood out for the young-buck optimism of
its big-breathing, airy rooms. MGB—that’s Steve McFarlane, Michael Green and Michelle Biggar—produces work that is always rooted in the local but could never be called provincial. Their strident horizontal lines are powerfully reminiscent of our horizon; the quality of their execution, characterized by a love affair with wood and pared-down effects, is uncompromising. Judge Bing Thom says their work “speaks poetically of its West Coast genre.”
Their public and commercial architecture ranges from an airport in Chicago to a North Vancouver city hall to a 37-storey tower in Taiwan. Judge John Brown enthuses over their “sophisticated and fresh” designs, and says: “They richly deserve a bigger profile.” Their nomination for this year’s Marcus Prize (a global hunt for a top emerging firm, worth $100,000) doesn’t hurt.
The work that’s earned them the most praise is the Accessory Building.
A 269-square-foot modernist structure that nods at mid-century L.A. architect Rudolph Schindler, it sits apart from Michael Green’s 1926 Craftsman-style house in North Vancouver. MGB began here, in 2003. Anticipating today’s fascination with density and suburban infill, they built themselves a laneway office.
“We thought we’d still be there today,” says McFarlane. But in 2005
they moved to larger offices; 32 people are now on staff. There’s still that early DIY sensibility permeating their work. “We’d never shop out our projects to an interior firm,” says Biggar, bouncing her young daughter, Max, on her lap. “We handle everything.”
For Green, the firm’s holistic approach dictates that a designer should
be a builder and a creator, too. A single dad to two young kids, he’s
built a garage and a koi pond and handcrafts their toys.
All three principals are young, unpretentious and focused on
opportunity, particularly in tough economic times. “Because we’re a small firm,” says McFarlane, “we can shift toward socially and community-based projects. We won’t ever do a casino, for example.”
As the trio basks in the summer sun in his backyard, Green parks
himself at a Roland keyboard inside the Accessory Building and starts improvising. Music spills into the garden. “Sounds good, right? It just comes to me.”
Judge Patricia Patkau says: “Today, living in the West has more to do with an appreciation of our close intimacy with the ‘natural’ and a growing concern for how we maintain a positive balance in this relationship. MGB’s body of work suggests a care and concern for that relationship.” They invite you to step out into the green and blue surrounds, to be at home in the larger world. wl
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Judges
John Brown is a professor of architecture at the University of Calgary and the founder of the Slow Home Design School (theslowhome
.com). He is a founding principal of the Calgary firm Housebrand, which integrates architecture, interior design, construction and real estate brokerage into a vertically integrated process that offers a critical alternative to Canada’s production home industry.
Bruce Haden is a principal at Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden Architects in Vancouver. His projects include houses, institutional buildings and large-scale urban design. In 2008 he received a Governor General’s medal on behalf of the firm for Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre in Osoyoos, B.C. His teaching and journalism activities include work for CBC Radio, Canadian Architect and Azure. He is chair of the board of Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery and sits on the Vancouver Urban Design Panel.
Neil Minuk is the founder of Winnipeg’s DIN Projects and a professor of architecture at the University of Manitoba. He is the director of the Arch 2 Gallery and a former president of the board of the Plugin Institute of Contemporary Art. He has lectured nationally, including at the Vancouver Architecture League Public Lecture. In 2003, he received the Joep Van Lieshout International Pig-Headed Artist of the Year and in 2007 he was elected a member of the RCA.
Patricia Patkau is a professor of architecture at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of Patkau Architects, which has won more than two dozen major awards (including Western Living’s Lifetime Achievement Award). This year she was awarded the Sigma Tau Delta Gold Medal in architecture and jointly, with her partner John Patkau, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal and the first Architectural Digest Prize. She is a member of the Order of Canada.
Bing Thom is one of Canada’s most admired and accomplished architects and urbanists. He completed his apprenticeship in the office of Arthur Erickson, where he worked until founding Bing Thom Architects in 1980. His groundbreaking buildings and urban designs have been published in most of the world’s leading architectural journals, and he has received the Order of Canada and the Golden Jubilee Medal.
ONES TO WATCH
The 2002 recipient of the prestigious Prix de Rome, Calgary-based Marc Boutin is well known for his public spaces, but this year wowed us with some recently designed homes, including the ridge-side Frame House in the B.C. interior and private residences in Calgary. Always sensitive to their sites and often using sharp modern geometry, these homes are jewel boxes that help define a new generation of residential architecture in the West.
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