Go West

Richard Davignon launched his own architectural firm in 2001 with the naïve exuberance that comes from being four years out of grad school and barely into his 30s. "It's something I look back on now and think, wow, I didn't realize how risky it was and how much it was going to take," he laughs. "It's an absolute requirement that you not know."

Yet this year's One to Watch in Architecture wasn't always so impulsive with his life decisions. Davignon, who was born and raised in Montreal, lost his father at 16; he soon convinced himself he needed to study in a field that would guarantee him a job once he graduated. He signed up for structural engineering-and, one year into the program, he knew he'd made a mistake.

Not one to leave something unfinished, Davignon completed the program at McGill, then headed to grad school in architecture at the University of Calgary. He met and married his wife, and put down roots in his adopted city.

ABOVE Sitting Room: The materials that architect Richard Davignon selected for the home are meant to reflect an original modernist palette: elongated brick, metal panels and wood siding on the ceiling.

But those four years as an engineering student were anything but wasted. "When we're designing, I'm able to visualize a home like a Meccano set and see how it goes together," he explains. "I just understand how the structural portions work." That knowledge allows him to take more risks, cantilevering portions of a home, say, because he understands the limits and strengths of a design.

He's developed a reputation for understanding and dealing with challenging and unappealing sites. For the residence shown here, Davignon overcame a double whammy: a flat, uninteresting site parked on a busy thoroughfare. The homeowner could only access the lot from the alley, but wanted to place the garage on the streetfront to help buffer traffic noise-meaning they would lose valuable square footage if they had to give up land for a driveway.

Davignon first tackled the problem site. "We decided that if we didn't have an interesting site, we were going to build it," he explains. By excavating and creating a valley, Davignon was able to design the house so that the homeowner could drive under it, through an internal courtyard and into the garage at the front of the lot. The main floor of the house, where the kitchen and living rooms are housed, is cantilevered over that interior courtyard. An adjoining bridge connects the driveway with the living space, and features a two-storey, glassed-in room for a totem pole.

ABOVE Kitchen: The room is positioned to take advantage of the view to an internal courtyard; in summers, bi-fold doors open up so that the living area extends out to a second-floor patio.

Davignon credits his very urban outlook with growing up in Montreal. "When I was in Montreal, it never occurred to me to have ownership of where I lived," he explains. "If you lived downtown, someone had lived there for 80 years, and someone will live there another 80 afterward. In Calgary, most homes are new. I always think for any of our projects-how does someone else continue with this?"

Judge Marc Boutin spotted this new urbanist tendency in Davignon, commenting, "He has a strong penchant for transforming precedents to address new conditions: urban, material, technological, cultural." Indeed, his work on a multi-family resident project in Calgary's Beltline neighbourhood, which took its cues from the row houses of Montreal, was heralded by the local community association as an example of how the area should be developing-a union of the strength of the old (neighbourhood connection, enduring design) with a modern bent on architectural design. "I want to merge the aesthetic with a much older way of building, what I'm used to from Montreal," he explains. "I love looking at really old buildings, and rethinking how we would do this today."