Patricia Patkau, FRAIC, FAIA (hon.), RIBA

Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 6:30pm
Colden “Coke” Florance Lecture
Architecture Building Auditorium

Patricia Patkau has shared design direction in Patkau Architects with John Patkau since the firm’s founding in 1978. She holds a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University. In addition to her practice, she is a Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia, where she has taught since the 1980s. She is a Fellow of the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada, an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, and a Member of the Order of Canada.

Patkau Architects is an internationally recognized architectural design studio based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In over 25 years of practice, both in Canada and in the United States, Patkau Architects has been responsible for the design of a wide variety of building types for a diverse range of clients.

Projects vary in scale from gallery installations to master planning, from modest houses to major urban libraries. Many projects have involved functional programming, management of detailed public processes, and design of complex buildings and sites. Comprehensive involvement throughout all phases of the design and construction process has consistently resulted in award-winning projects.

Patkau Architects has also been involved in research projects, including an extensive investigation into issues of sustainable building and a detailed study of emerging educational technologies for the University of Texas, Houston Health Science Center.

Current work includes a Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, an interdisciplinary Center for Music, Art and Design at the University of Manitoba, an ecological hotel on a former industrial site, now owned by the Scenic Hudson Land Trust, in Beacon, New York, as well as a variety of residential projects in diverse locations ranging from a northern island off the coast of British Columbia to a farm in Ad’Diriyyah, Saudi Arabia.

Patricia Patkau seeks to explore the full richness and diversity of architectural practice, understanding it as a critical cultural act that engages our most fundamental desires and aspirations. She refuses singular definitions of architecture: as art, as technology, as social service, as environmental agent, as political statement. Rather, she embraces all these definitions, together, as part of the rich, complex and vital discipline that she believes architecture to be.

Patkau Architects

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