Diamond Schmitt Architects: Fluid Boundaries

Diamond Schmitt Architects are a Canadian firm with international projects whose work embodies a fluidity of boundaries.

Their recent Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver leads the way, blurring boundaries between artistic disciplines via an industrial inspired high tech chic, while their recent addition to the Canadian Senate in Ottawa articulates boundaries between historic Edwardian and contemporary architecture with a sense of integrity and cohesion that respects the old and embraces the new.

Similarly, their recent renovation of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, articulates different artistic disciplines while honouring the brutalist beauty of the original building through subtle shifts in scale and massing.

Their Taylor Centre for Learning in Calgary brings together disparate disciplines from across the campus and acts as an educational laboratory, with hyper flexible teaching spaces housing everyone from art students to physics professors, and their Lazaridis Hall at Wilfrid Laurier University offers a similar open concept design.

Even their new Research Tower at Sickkids Hospital in Toronto expresses a team concept as it spatially unites different but co-existent research facilities.

Architecture Critic Hadani Ditmars will present on these projects and explore how Diamond Schmitt Architects use boundaries as a device for creating innovative new design. Q&A to follow.