L-R: Tom Balaban, Jennifer Thorogood, Mikaèle Fol, Julia Manaças

Montreal-based architect Tom Balaban founded his eponymous architecture firm, TBA in short, in 2009. Since, he and his small but growing studio have built up an impressive portfolio of built and speculative work. While Balaban oversees the firm's built projects, his partner Jennifer Thorogood helps to run the research-side of things, which the practice is constantly pushing. For this week's Studio Snapshot, the firm discusses how their plethora of research projects is vital to their design process. 

How many people are in your practice?

Four to five people, depending on the season.  We don’t have much of a turnover. Having worked together for a while, we are quite efficient without the staff having to put in crazy hours.  We produce a lot more than one would imagine for an office our size. Each of us is responsible for a couple of projects at the same time – I oversee the built work while Jennifer heads up the research and more artistic side of the practice. 

What originally motivated you to start your own practice?

I had been working for several years in well-known design practices, first in Los Angeles then in Montréal. When I started teaching part-time, I began questioning the kind of work I was doing. As I began to articulate answers to these questions, the motivation to start my own practice grew. It is a classic story: a desire for autonomy and defining my own agenda for a practice. In hindsight, it had been long overdue. One of the partners at the office I left referred me for a small duplex project they were not interested in taking on. After that project, work started rolling in through word of mouth.

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice?

Our goal is to scale up the size of our projects, without having to scale the office up too much. We would ideally like to reduce the quantity of jobs we take, and focus on a few quality projects at different scales. We are looking for larger, public work that has cultural impact without giving up the more direct and intimate relationships we build with clients on small private projects.

In the meantime, we’ve started engaging in collaborations. It is preferable to enter into a joint venture/collaboration with another office or take on the design component of a project rather than expand and contract repeatedly, hiring and firing project to project.

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small? 

It allows you to maintain a certain level of creativity, control and quality of work. One of the greatest benefits in keeping a design-driven office small is staying involved in all aspects of the project one would like to stay involved in.

It is nice not to have the pressure of feeding a large rigid machine. Our work also does not feel like it is churned out from a large machine. In Montréal, like many Canadian cities, corporate offices are rebranding and repositioning themselves as design-oriented firms, usually by swallowing up young designers.  The aspirations seem genuine, and the quality of design does improve. However, they cannot eliminate the homogenizing influence of a large office. The projects still lack a level of imagination and thoughtfulness that you see in the projects directed by a small practice.

One of the things we struggle with is the private sector’s pressure to brand through specialization. We have become known for our contemporary interventions in complex and design sensitive existing conditions. As architects we like the richness of practice and the investigation that comes with different type of work. Business wise it also makes sense be diverse. It is a constant struggle to cultivate a coherent image in the private sector with clients without focusing on a typology or being recognized as doing a very specific type of work.

What sort of research and speculative work is the firm currently engaged in?

Exhibitions, installations, research projects, dabbling into project specific product design – we constantly push these aspects of the practice. They work hand and hand with our built work. Our current research project Average House came about from the work we do with existing structures and heritage environments. It questions current “alphabet” approaches to architectural integration and traditional notions of classification. It explores new avenues using digital processes, using building scanning and 3 dimensional averaging techniques in an attempt to reveal the most common morphological characteristics of buildings. The project has now crossed over into a design studio I teach. The students are teasing out some really interesting possibilities. It seems very promising.

How do you see these types of 'unbuilt' work feeding back into the practice?

Building is important to our practice but it is not always the best forum in which to work through ideas, especially with the budgetary constraints and high level of conservatism under which we operate. We find when we apply speculative ideas in their raw form to real projects, they tend to transform into ‘unbuilt’ projects.

We don’t yet have the luxury of being able to pick and choose the perfect projects to work on. However, we do select on the ones that have potential. So, we always try to push and test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable for our clients. Usually we are quite good at gaging the client’s threshold. When we miscalculate, commissions turn into unbuilt projects. 

Our Hotel Mile End proposal is a good example of how our unbuilt work serves as field testing out some of our ideas from the Average project. It was an invited competition. We didn’t win but we walked away feeling like it was possible. It was encouraging and were are bringing back the process in a project currently on the boards.

Some unbuilt work also has a way of simmering under the surface. Average and our Impostor Cities proposal (undertaken with David Theodore) for the 2020 Venice Biennale in Architecture is making the office question the explicitness of our profession. We strive for clarity and specificity. Yet, people interpret architecture in uncontrollable and unexpected ways. Both points of view seems quite obvious. Maybe it is just a symptom of what is occurring in a larger social context but I think there is a lot to learn in exploring the friction between those two realities.

The firm's proposal for the 2020 Venice Biennale looks at Canada's role as a filming location, often standing in for other places. What motivated this focus?

Imposter Cities is about how we view architecture and the place that Canadian buildings and spaces occupy in our collective cinematic consciousness. Canada is film-famous. Most people know our architecture although they will first recognize it as somewhere else: Paris at the turn of the 19th century, Moscow today or a city on an alien planet. We are asking, if our buildings are designed to be specific to climate, geography, and culture, then how can this be? What does it say about Canadian architecture? Baudrillard describes the North American city as “a screen of signs and formulas”. In Europe, “you step out of an Italian or Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had come out of the paintings and not the other way around.” The North American city, on the other hand, “seems to have stepped out of the movies. To grasp its secrets, you should not, then, begin with the city and move towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move towards the city.”

The proposal in a way grew out of our Average project and exploring a different misreading of Montréal’s architecture. In our research, we came across a site for location scouts that dressed up our spaces as other cities. We thought it was time to repatriate our architecture and make people aware that these film-famous buildings (some iconic and some quite generic) are actually Canadian. It is about Canadian identity but also looking at what makes this misreading possible.

Do you have a favorite project—completed or in progress?

Unbuilt work always has the allure of possibility that built work lacks.  Our Helby Island House, an off-grid tent-dwelling hybrid on a remote island in British Columbia is an office favorite that has potential to be a great realized project. On the speculative front, Average excites me personally, I feel that there is something substantial there in terms of applied research.

We are currently working on an idiosyncratic infill project involving a one story, front lot extension to a unique back-lot Shoebox house. The house is designed around three existing mature trees and plays with the notion of what a house should look like. We have all become accustomed with building in the city, with a certain overwhelming continuity. People are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that a tree interrupts a good third of the façade. We arrived on site one morning to find that someone had graffitied the construction sign overnight. Loosely translated, it read “If you cannot build a house, then don’t build it”. Everyone has a different interpretation of what that could mean. I’m excited to see how it will be perceived once it is complete.