EXPANDED HORIZON

The firm’s most recent intervention won a place in the Winter Light Exhibition at Ontario Place in Toronto. The open-ended steel box was positioned to frame views of the setting sun on Lake Ontario and the park itself, which includes the iconic 1971 Cinesphere. Led by Michaela Macleod, who teaches at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo, and Nicholas Croft, an architect with Toronto firm MJMA, Polymétis borrows its moniker from a 1755 book; the name roughly translates to “many trades.” It’s a fitting handle for a duo that, despite a penchant for constructing boxes, refuses to fit into one.

BACKSTORY

In hindsight, Macleod and Croft’s career trajectories both seem to be unwavering: Kids drawn to art and science became high school students already sure of their calling in architecture. But several degrees later, both were still looking for a niche. “I had done terms in architecture, and worked for two urban design firms in Toronto,” Macleod says. “Then I moved to New York and worked at a landscape architecture firm. I tried everything I could potentially do with my degree.” Croft, also in New York, was working under land artist Maya Lin. “That was eye-opening,” he says of the experience. “She was doing work that straddles the line between architecture, landscape architecture and, sometimes, just pure art. To watch her work and learn how she thinks was a big moment for me.” Another big moment came in 2012, when Croft responded to Macleod’s Craigslist ad seeking a roommate to share her East Village apartment. Just weeks after Croft moved in, the two were teaming up to create Pink Punch, an installation for a forest clearing in the Jardins de Métis, in Quebec. The following spring they headed north to construct the piece for the venue’s International Garden Festival. “They have these beautiful little cottages on the river where you stay,” Macleod says. “You work hard all day building your thing, and then you get to meet the other artists at night. It’s a great experience.” Unveiled in June of 2013, the sculpture consisted of little more than trees wrapped with fluorescent pink surgical tubing, but the effect was spectacular, as if the trunks were coated in goo that oozed across the forest floor. “Pink Punch was all about coming across a very bright, alien thing that draws you through the green of the forest,” Croft says. The highly photogenic project was a success, and spurred the establishment of Polymétis.