Western Living Design Icons 2025: Patkau Architects

It’s beyond question that the Patkaus are the West’s most lauded architects. The accolades are so plentiful that if you took the individual principals, John and Patricia, and gave them each half the awards they have received, they’d each still respectively top the list. But we’d also like to put forward the proposition that, international reputation aside, they’re also our most Western Canadian Architects.

Geographically, they’ve got it covered. They started in the late 1960s as undergrads at the University of Manitoba. John, an arts and environmental science grad, stuck around for a masters in architecture. Patricia, an interior design grad tired of fixing architects’ mistakes, headed to Yale for her M.Arch.

Next, a move to booming Edmonton, where the two young practitioners knock that city on its architectural ear with series houses (back in the early 2000s, Western Living chose their 1984 McGregor House as one of the best homes ever designed in Western Canada) and commercial projects (the Galleria condominium building, with its interior balconies) that reimagined the design possibilities of the previously staid city. Finally, Vancouver: their home since 1984 and spiritual base, from where their reputation expanded exponentially and where, ultimately, clients from all over North America (and Ontario in particular) would make the pilgrimage so as to share in their vision.

Then the materials. Has anyone showed more reverence for wood than the Patkaus? In an age where Mies-ian steel and Erickson-ian concrete were the de rigueur starting point, the duo embraced the natural bounty surrounding them like only a pair of Prairie kids could. Wood, wood, everywhere. Celebrated, contorted; used for beauty but also for untapped strength, the Patkaus helped make high design that came from forest.

They also embraced the natural light, harnessing it and treasuring it in a way only someone who’s lived through a West Coast winter can (one of their classics is an ashram in the Kootenays, fittingly called the Temple of Light). And they gravitated toward the craggy, rocky sites that would repel many a less bold designer (their Audain Art Museum in Whistler literally straddles a flood plain). Outcroppings were their sweet spot, incorporated into the plan as if they were a co-operating partner. Even in their most urban projects, nature always comes along for the ride.

And, at last, the people. Not just John and Patricia, who in any business-sense scenario would have left Vancouver decades ago for a bigger centre and higher-profile projects, but also the people they’ve surrounded themselves with. Together they created a firm that eschews the great visionary model in favour of a collective approach to problem solving and material research, as well as sustainability long before it became an expected buzzword. It’s an approach embodied by their website: past the accolades, the books about them (three and counting) and their furniture designs is a tab called people. Not only does it list the 20 odd individuals who now make up the firm, it also includes the well over 100 additional names of everyone who’s ever worked at the firm and helped make Patkau Architects what it is. It’s an amalgam of gratitude, modesty and community that’s impossible not to respect.

So this honour, our 2025 Western Living Design Icons, goes not just to Patkau Architects, but also to John and Pat, the geniuses next door.

Join us as we celebrate the Patkaus at our Western Living Designers of the Year Awards: purchase tickets now!