The decisive moment came on a winter afternoon, while Bruce Kuwabara was pacing through a parking lot in the slush. This would be the site of a new building, an addition to the University of Toronto’s management school, and KPMB was trying to imagine how to do it. The biggest challenge involved where to put an event space for 400 people: Below ground, it would be dark; at ground level, it would take up too much room. “But,” recalls Kuwabara, “the third option is: Put it up in the air. And I thought, ‘Bingo! that’s it.’ ”

This could be your typical architectural-creation narrative. But the story he tells me had already begun: He was there, with wet feet, only because he’d missed a meeting. Then, an old friend stepped out of the building next door – he was rehearsing for his wedding at the nearby chapel. “I said, ‘This is what I’m thinking,’ ” recalls Kuwabara. “And he began to pose questions.”

Six years later, what came out of that discussion, and many others, is a building of great elegance. The Rotman School of Management expansion is a stack of perfectly proportioned boxes, dressed in a grey suit of zinc and glass, fitting deftly into a crowded block (and with a curving hot-pink staircase slicing through it). This week, it won aGovernor-General’s Medal for Architecture – one of two this year for KPMB. More than a quarter-century after they started, this Toronto office, now led by Kuwabara, Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg, has assumed an important place in Canadian culture, as city builders, mentors and advocates. But nothing about their work or their career has been simple. They deal in complexity.

Most people think that architecture begins with a visual trademark. Frank Gehry: scrunches. Zaha Hadid: swoops. The truth, even in today’s image-driven architectural culture, is never so simple. KPMB makes good buildings, in a contemporary expression of architectural modernism, that are not easily summarized. They favour certain types of details – silky, natural-stone walls; the layering of translucent and transparent planes; poetic juxtapositions of wood, steel and glass.

Their projects rarely look alike. The common threads are abstract: an intense attention to the public realm; and a sense of the whole building that unifies large “moves” with carefully conceived details and material choices. Those two impulses – to look out to the city and inward to small things – have been KPMB’s since the beginning.

The office began in early 1987, when their boss at the time, American architect Barton Myers, left town and handed over his Toronto practice to the three architects and their friend Thomas Payne. The four set out to run it collaboratively....Continue Reading

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