November 2025

In our November issue

At first blush, there’s a clear distinction between the scope of work of architects and landscape architects. But that doesn’t always hold true. This month’s issue looks at a series of projects where the work of architecture and landscape architecture are tightly intertwined and interwoven.

For our cover story, Claire Lubell visits Place des Montréalaises, a plaza led by architecture firm Lemay, artist Angela Silver, and engineers AtkinsRealis. Structured around a giant inclined plane that bridges the Bonaventure Expressway, it’s a hefty piece of infrastructure—and a rich meadow-like landscape. Narrative, too, is imbued throughout the project, whose name and design honours some two dozen women who were key to the city’s history.

Travelling to the West Coast, we take a look at Simon Fraser University’s Gibson Art Museum, designed by Hariri Pontarini Architects with Iredale Architecture. It’s nestled at the edge of the campus famously designed by Arthur Erickson as an architectural response to its site atop Burnaby Mountain. The Gibson, too, sits in tight relationship to its landscape: its entry canopy stretches out in an echo of Erickson’s horizontal forms, and its low-slung volume blends among the trees. More importantly, the Gibson centers the idea of a promenade—more common in gardens than buildings—encouraging students to short-cut along its main spine, while enticing them with study areas and art exhibitions en route.

The revamp of the University of Toronto’s central green is another instance of architecture and landscape design working in tight coordination. The Landmark Project by KPMB Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) removed the traffic circle that long dominated the front campus. After sinking the parking underground, they topped it with a pedestrian-priority lawn and necklace of gardens. Within the Landmark Project, Brook McIlroy Architects’ Ziibiing landscape, with its bronze Knowledge House pavilion, offers an Indigenous space for ceremony, education and contemplation.

On a larger scale, MVVA also recently completed Toronto’s Biidaasige, a 50-acre park on Toronto’s waterfront. The park is part of a masterplan by MVVA that builds a new, naturalized mouth for the Don River, and protects 174 hectares of land in the Port Lands and eastern waterfront from flooding, unlocking space for future mixed-use neighbourhoods. While Biidaasige’s parkland and playgrounds were officially inaugurated this summer, its waterways enjoyed a kind of second inauguration this fall. Photographer Amanda Large captured the event: a performance by artist Melissa McGill, featuring a flotilla of 120 canoes with hand-dyed flags, travelling from Biidaasige to the city’s harbour.

Architecture-trained Bill Pechet, who also trained in geography and visual arts, is the subject of two pieces in this month’s pages. Leslie Van Duzer’s recent monograph on Pechet’s wide-spanning work—from houses and commercial interiors to playgrounds, plazas, and urban lighting—is reviewed. And Marc Treib takes us on a visit to one of Pechet’s most striking projects, Little Spirits Garden, a memorial ground for infants near Victoria, B.C. Composed of concrete retaining bars topped with house-like forms that invite personalization by families, it combines primary elements from both landscape and architecture, to poignant effect.

At Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Witthöft & LaTourelle’s Betonwaves installation uses rubble to tell a powerful story of reconciliation. Using demolition waste from the Hudson’s Bay Company Building across the street, the artists created new bricks, arrayed in irregular walls. Painted in shades of blue, the sculptures evoke sky rather than earth, and ruins rather than monuments: this turns the narrative of the colonial building on its head.

Finally, we pay tribute to Dr. Kongjian Yu, founder of Chinese landscape firm Turenscape, who died in a plane crash in Brazil. Yu pioneered the Sponge Cities concept for water resilience in urban environments, which became Chinese national policy in 2013, and has taken hold in cities and countries around the world.

-Elsa Lam, editor

The post November 2025 appeared first on Canadian Architect.