KITCHENER ARCHITECT I CHANGE MAKERS
Beautiful Cambridge home just one of Bob Dyck’s successes.
WORDS BEFORE LINES, words before lines . . .
It’s like a mantra for Kitchener architect Bob Dyck when he begins making plans for a building.
It could be a retirement home — he has designed close to 70 of those — or it could be a private family dwelling or an office-commercial project. The first step is to talk through the details with his clients so that everyone understands what is needed and what is wanted. A meeting to discuss “needs, dreams and ideas” is how Dyck describes it.
A magnificent home with an enticing view over the Speed River in the Preston area of >>
>> Cambridge is a project recently completed with this philosophy in mind. The owners, Del and Margaret Huntley, had a choice location and wanted a Georgian-style home with a stone exterior — a “home for life” they can enjoy for many years to come. One way to achieve that last goal was to install an elevator that connects three of the four floors in the residence. Del Huntley is president of Bearing Bronze Limited, a Cambridge firm that supplies bronze bar stock, milled brass plate and precision bronze bushings to manufacturers and end-users across North America. He and Margaret launched the business in 1970 and today there are 40 employees at the Sheldon Drive plant. “This home is known locally as ‘the castle,’ ” says Del, who acted as a selfcontractor for construction of the dwelling. His own company supplied the copper used to cap the roof of the turret and cover much of the flashings, soffits and fascia.
It has a slate roof and walls built with limestone from an Owen Sound area quarry. The inside floors and stair treads use cherry hardwood from Brazil, wood so dense it will sink if put in water, Del says. He and Margaret spent years making plans for the property and getting municipal approvals to proceed. For a two-month period some years ago they made weekly trips to Dyck’s office for two-hour discussions. Now that they’re in the home, it’s like living in a small hotel, Del says. “We just love it . . . love it!” Margaret says. Although it has many features of the Georgian style, including a centred front entrance and chimneys on both sides, the Huntley home reflects more than one architectural style, Dyck says.
“It’s what grew out of our discussions,” he says during an interview at the downtown Kitchener offices of Robert J Dyck Architect & Engineer Inc., an older home that also serves as a residence for Dyck and his partner, Jill Simpson, a busy fitness and ballroom dance instructor.
The building, at 79 Benton St., is a curious hybrid. It’s a busy workplace where Dyck has three employees — office manager Michelle Boonstra, project manager David McLagan and draftsman Bob Boorse. But it’s also a comfortable abode, with a modern kitchen, beautiful wood trim and walls painted in warm, soothing colours. In short, it reflects Dyck’s own needs, dreams and ideas.
Being hired to design a single-family home is a bit like getting to enjoy a “dessert” in his work schedule, he says. It means the talking stage will be done with family members who are not just clients, but people who will actually use the completed building at all hours of the day.
And before the design is complete, he will know quite a bit about those family members and what they want to do in their home. They tell him just about everything, he says.
“I never experience conflict between the spouses,” he adds.
And that’s because they start by dealing with words, not lines, he explains.
“As long as you agree on the words, the lines will follow. . . . You deal with the words first.”
A quotation at the top of the home page on Dyck’s website declares the following: “Success in building depends largely upon how and where you begin, and you don’t begin with architecture!”
Dyck, who will turn 68 in July, has had plenty of time to absorb and distil the philosophy he espouses. He has been at home on construction sites since he was five years old and picking up nails for his father, Jake, a self-employed carpenter who built custom homes in the Niagara Peninsula.
Both of Dyck’s parents were Russian Mennonites who came to Canada as children in the first half of the 20th century. His father’s skilled hands were matched by his mother Helen’s business sense, which she likely inherited.
Her entrepreneurial father, Martin Boese, >>
>> launched and operated Boese Foods, a St. Catharines-area business that canned and processed fruit for sale under the Henley brand and for years hired more than 1,000 people each year during the canning season. Thankful for their success, the Boese family provided financial help that allowed almost 250 people to move to Canada from struggling Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, Brazil and Germany.
Until Dyck was five, his family lived on a fruit farm outside Virgil, a hamlet between Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake. Then his father sold the farm and they moved to nearby St. Catharines, where his father concentrated on building homes. By the time he was seven, Dyck says, he was able to cut and install the trim for an entire house his father was building, including hanging the doors.
That meant working to Jake Dyck’s exacting standards. His father ultimately gave up his business, Dyck says, because he couldn’t compete for price with competitors who were less conscientious about quality.
His father taught him how to work hard, Dyck says. And to work away at problems, to not give up until an answer emerges.
“My dad always worked hard, close to 60 hours a week sometimes. . . . That was just what you did.”
By the time he finished high school, Dyck knew he was interested in building design. But he was turned down by the University of Waterloo’s school of architecture and wound up enrolled in its engineering school instead.
He had several “really fascinating instructors” there and credits one of them, George Soulis, a Waterloo furniture designer and factory manager who left private industry to teach design to UW engineering students, for instilling in him an appreciation for truly understanding the needs of the end user, whatever the project.
Dyck graduated in 1971 with a bachelor of applied sciences degree in civil engineering and spent two years working as an estimator and project manager for a firm that built roads and installed municipal services. His resumé says he supervised a major sewer and road project for the entire town of Baden, west of Kitchener in Wilmot Township.
Next up was a 13-year stint with Schiedel Construction Inc. of Cambridge, working as an engineer, chief estimator and project manager. This position let him begin to use his design skills and he estimates he produced plans for 150 buildings with Schiedel, most of them for industrial uses.
It was during this period, Dyck says, that the Ontario government decided to create a formal separation between the work of architects and engineers. Until then engineers had been permitted to also do the work of architects, but to do this in the future Dyck now had to qualify as an architect. It required weeks of study, writing exams and enduring a session of questioning by a panel of senior architects.
“It was not that easy. It involved about 400
hours of my time to complete the process,” Dyck recalls. In 1987, he launched his own company, setting up his first office in a heritage building, the former Galt Carnegie Library on Water Street North in Cambridge. The building’s owner at the time, Albert Rumph, a retirement home developer, had made him an offer. If Dyck became his tenant in the old library, he would be hired to do any architectural work Rumph required for his projects, many of which involved transforming large heritage homes into retirement residences for seniors. One of the buildings Rumph acquired in this period was Langdon Hall, a grand mansion above the Grand River in the Blair area of Cambridge. It had been constructed in 1898 by Eugene Langdon Wilks, a great grandson of the New York real estate magnate John Jacob Astor. Rumph believed the mansion could be turned into a retirement home. But while he was making up his mind, the property was regularly being vandalized. To discourage this, he arranged a short-term lease for his architect. For three months Dyck got to live at Langdon Hall, along with his then wife and their children.
Ultimately, Rumph changed his mind and sold the property to architect Bill Bennett, who had plans to develop a guesthouse.
Dyck and Bennett worked together to design the project. Langdon Hall opened as a luxury inn and dining spot in 1987. Today, more than 25 years later, Dyck is helping to design a proposed expansion of the inn’s kitchen and dining room.
Over the years Dyck has become a good friend of Bennett, who remains the owner of today’s Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa along with his partner, Margaret Beaton.
Dyck describes Bennett as one of his mentors and credits the innkeeper for inspiring him to fully enjoy the pleasure and the fun in creating a building space that works.
“He (Bennett) takes delight in anything he does,” Dyck says. “He’ll say, ‘Isn’t this terrific? Isn’t this delightful? This is so much fun.’ ”
One of Dyck’s recent local projects was to produce plans for The Westhill, a Sifton Properties retirement home that opened in the summer of 2013 near Erb Street West and Ira Needles Boulevard in Waterloo.
The inspiration for part of the design came during a short holiday Dyck took in the Tuscany region of Italy, where he found himself greatly moved by the beautiful old buildings and lively streetscapes he was seeing.
Dining one day at a lively restaurant in the heart of Florence, one that Bennett had recommended he visit, Dyck found himself sketching plans for the spacious front lobby that would go in The Westhill building back home in Waterloo.
He wasn’t trying to replicate any specific thing he had seen in Tuscany, Dyck says, simply to design a space that made him feel the same kind of passion. >>
>> “I just drew it up and there it was,” he says. In November 2013 Dyck received a Wood Works! Award from the Ontario arm of the Canadian Wood Council for his work on The Westhill, which like many of his projects was built with wood structural framing. Using wood simplifies projects and reduces building costs, says Dyck, who is anticipating that the ongoing development of hardware components for use with wood will eventually prompt changes in building regulations and see wood framing become common in buildings as high as 10 and 12 storeys. For now, four storeys is the maximum allowed. There are other advantages to wood, he says, pluses that benefit the people who live and work in buildings where it has been used. People are simply more comfortable with wood than they are with other building materials — and that helps to relieve stress, he says. “Seniors can live much longer in a wood building than they can in a steel or concrete building.” Dyck’s firm is now completing plans for an 11-storey building with apartments for seniors that Sifton Properties plans to construct just north of The Westhill retirement residence. It will be connected to the residence by an enclosed, raised walkway.
Another of his recent projects is the Montgomery Village Seniors Community in Orangeville, Ont., which opened last October. After working for more than four decades in the building industry, Dyck says he has no plans to retire. If he has his way, he will get to design many more buildings, always by putting words before lines. “Having done 70 retirement homes, what I have learned is that I don’t have all the answers,” he says.
It’s his clients who decide what gets built. His job is to listen to what they say. “I walk into my buildings now and I am quite humbled by the experience,” he says. “Not because they are such great buildings, but because they are being used and enjoyed by people in the way they were intended to be used and enjoyed.”