ARCHITECTS I CHANGE MAKERS
Robertson Simmons reshapes many facets of our community.
WITH A LITTLE PROMPTING, Laird Robertson will switch to the special language of architects to describe the eye-popping house he designed — its agrarian influences, its contemporary look, how it suits both the sloping property and the day-to-day needs of the occupants.
Scott Sinclair, the owner, is more apt to sum things up this way — “It’s cool.”
Sinclair, 52, moved into the east-side Cambridge home not quite two years ago and still marvels that he stumbled on it while “slightly casually” searching online real estate listings for this part of the province. He already had a nice home in Toronto, but wanted somewhere >>
>> more convenient for directing the retail venture he operates.
“I saw this one and I thought, Wow . . . holy smokes!”
In Sinclair’s description, the dwelling has a cluster of outbuildings — like something you might see in rural France — all connecting in the centre in a style you might see in a hillside property in Hollywood.
He loves his home’s loft spaces, its outdoor water feature, the non-manicured look of the grounds. Together they exude something like a Zen Buddhism atmosphere, he says.
Robertson, a partner with the Kitchener firm Robertson Simmons Architects Inc., designed the home about 10 years ago and now is working with Sinclair to add some features of his original plans that the initial owners chose not to complete.
“It’s a very special house,” he says. “I’m very proud of it, and it’s probably my favourite piece of architecture among the works I’ve done.”
Designing single-family residences is a personal pleasure for Robertson, 53, one of three partners in Robertson Simmons along with Patrick Simmons and Jason Martin. The company is much better known for the many large and attractive buildings it has designed across Waterloo Region in recent decades — everything from shiny schools, health-care structures, industrial plants and corporate offices to “adaptive reuse” projects that have seen aging structures reinvented for new purposes.
Recent projects include the massive Northfield campus built for BlackBerry Inc. (originally Research In Motion) in Waterloo, the school of accounting and finance at the University of Waterloo, the Open Text Corp. headquarters in Waterloo, the Breithaupt Block office project in downtown Kitchener and the Langs Community Health Centre in Cambridge.
Its design work can also be seen at the Manulife Sportsplex at RIM Park, the MMM Group Ltd. (Enermodal Engineering division) offices beside the Grand River in Kitchener and at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School in Waterloo — one of dozens of projects it has designed for school boards in Waterloo Region and elsewhere in Canada.
If Robertson Simmons has a brand, it’s that it is known for design. And its track record gives Robertson the confidence to underline
the firm’s flair for creative work. “We’ve contributed to the history of building great architecture in this community,” he says during an interview in the company’s offices, located at the edge of downtown Kitchener in the former Caya Fabrics building at Weber and Breithaupt streets. “When you drive people around town and point out to them all the different buildings that we’ve done, they’re like, ‘Oh my, you did all of those?’ ” The company believes it is the region’s longest running architecture firm, with roots going back to 1946 when the firm Barnett & Rieder was launched by Kitchener-based Carl Rieder and W.E. (Ed) Barnett in Toronto. These days the company has a staff of 20 or so people, plus four based at its small Toronto office. That’s down a bit from a few years ago, which in part reflects the changed fortunes of BlackBerry Inc., a company that in the last decade turned to Robertson Simmons for many of its construction projects in Ontario.
Weathering ups and downs in the economy and the workload is a constant challenge for architects everywhere, Robertson says.
And in a market like Waterloo Region, you can’t be a niche player. You have to adapt and jump at whatever opportunities come your way.
As much as the firm loves major projects, Robertson is keen to develop the residential part of its portfolio.
“We are interested, and always have been interested, in designing high-end residential houses. And we want to get the message out to people that they don’t have to go to Toronto to get a design.”
Looking ahead, Robertson Simmons is anticipating a favourable public response when its design for the next phase of the Breithaupt Block project in Kitchener takes shape at the very visible King Street end of the site, just steps from the Region of Waterloo’s proposed transit hub at King and Victoria streets.
The Robertson Simmons plans have been produced for Perimeter Development Corp., the firm behind the six-building Breithaupt Block redevelopment. The former rubber-industry building along King Street West — which will hold offices for Google Canada — will get an updated >>
graduated with his degree in 1984 and later obtained a master’s degree in architecture (urban design) at Harvard University in the United States.
One of Simmons’ classmates at Carleton was Malcolm Lobban, and the friendship they developed would later prompt Simmons to join Lobban’s firm in Kitchener.
Also at Carleton in the early 1980s was Laird Robertson, who grew up in a densely populated Toronto neighbourhood north of Highway 401 that to this day is called The Peanut because of the peanut-shape pattern of roads that circle the development.
He credits his mother for suggesting his career choice.
“She saw that I was always building models and making sketches and doing creative things. There had never been an architect in our family and she had no real knowledge of architecture. . . . It was a guess, a very good guess on her part.”
After high school, he, too, studied architecture at Carleton, where Lobban and Simmons already had a year or two under their belts.
Robertson moved back to Toronto after he graduated in 1985, but he and his wife, Jennifer, soon found the city too expensive. >> exterior face and grow higher with a three-storey, glass-enclosed addition above the current roof.
How did the three Robertson Simmons partners find themselves working in Waterloo Region?
Simmons, 56, was first on the scene, arriving in 1992 when he was recruited by Malcolm Lobban, a Kitchener-born architect who had succeeded his father, William, at the helm of Rieder Hymmen & Lobban in Kitchener, a successor firm to the original Barnett & Rieder.
Raised in Hamilton, Simmons showed an aptitude for drawing and the visual arts as a teenager, but completed high school in the mid-1970s uncertain about his career plans. Also an athlete, he moved to Ottawa to join Canada’s national water polo team and travelled the world to compete in major competitions. He was with the team for nine years over a 15-year span, winding up his playing career in 1989.
Away from the pool, Simmons signed up for night classes offered by the school of architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa. And then, encouraged by an instructor, he entered the full-time program. He
They had a stroke of luck when architect Carlos Ventin offered jobs to both of them at his busy firm in Simcoe, Ont. She wrote project proposals for the firm and he designed schools. At the time, Robertson says, he was the typical Torontonian and knew little about southwestern Ontario. His first experience with Kitchener came when Ventin asked him to produce plans the firm could enter in the 1988 design competition for the proposed Kitchener City Hall. His entry didn’t make the list of finalists (Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects of Toronto was the winner) but he did learn a bit about the Kitchener area.
Living in Simcoe was great, but after a few years, the community “just seemed too small,” Robertson recalls. He knew Simmons had connected with Lobban in Kitchener and got a break when a mutual friend put a bug in Lobban’s ear about his design skills.
A chat at the Knotty Pine restaurant in Cambridge sealed the deal and the Robertsons relocated to Kitchener with their eight-month-old son.
Quicker than he thought possible, Robertson says, he felt at home. Away from work, he has served as a member of Heritage Kitchener, a municipal panel that advises Kitchener council regarding heritage buildings and other cultural resources
Life dealt Robertson a blow when Jennifer died in 2008, ill with both multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. Now remarried, he and his wife Carolyn have two children.
Simmons also suffered a tragic loss in 2001 when his wife, Laura, a landscape architect with the City of Cambridge, died of a brain tumor. He later remarried and now heads a family of six mostly adult children, three of his own and three that his second wife, Deborah, also an architect, brought to the marriage.
Rieder Hymmen & Lobban was renamed RHL Architects Inc. in the 1990s to reflect the changed ownership of the business. When Lobban later opted to move in a new direction and focus on opportunities in Toronto, Robertson and Simmons purchased his share of the business. In April 2006 the firm was renamed Robertson Simmons.
Jason Martin, 41, became a partner in 2013.
Unlike Robertson and Simmons, he has local roots. As a teenager enrolled at Elmira District Secondary School, he enjoyed studying natural sciences and saw himself working one day in an “outdoors” kind of career. His artistic talents led someone to suggest landscape architecture, but Martin eventually decided architectural school had more appeal.
He picked up the courses he needed by transferring to Bluevale Collegiate in Waterloo, then was accepted by the University of Toronto’s school of architecture. >>
>>“Once I got into university, I just loved it,” he says.
After graduating in 1998, Martin spent three years with a Vancouver architectural firm, then found work closer to his hometown. He spent two years on the staff of RHL Architects in Kitchener. Then, when the company’s workload hit a temporary lull, he commuted to a position in Hamilton for four years.
By 2007 Robertson Simmons was again hiring and Martin returned.
His immediate task was to help Simmons complete a series of projects for BlackBerry, including four big office buildings going up at BlackBerry’s Northfield Campus, a 47-acre development off Northfield Drive East in the RIM Park area.
“I took that on and within a month I was totally consumed by it,” Martin says.
More recently he produced plans for the Region of Waterloo’s $11.7-million overhaul of the 50-year-old former regional courthouse (originally the Waterloo County Courthouse) at Weber and Queen streets in downtown Kitchener.
“It’s a project that is basically building modern technology into a 1960s building,” he says.
Martin and his wife, Christine, have three children and live in an old brick home — it was built for a working man’s family, probably in about 1900, he says — in
Elora. Much of his free time in recent years was spent rebuilding a 1940s-era Peterborough Boat Works “Sportster,” a 16-foot, cedar strip runabout boat the family now enjoys each summer. Simmons also lives in an old home, in his case a stately limestone residence, built in 1888, that overlooks the downtown Galt area of Cambridge. His youngest daughter is on a water polo team and he helps with coaching.
As for Robertson, he lives in an eye-catching 1950s-era home in Kitchener, a flat-roof dwelling that many visitors tell him has a Frank Lloyd Wright look to it. It’s a house that reflects his passion for the “contemporary” architecture of that period, which far too often goes unappreciated, he says.
A sad comment on today’s housing industry, Robertson believes, is that while the look of cars and technological devices constantly changes, new subdivisions continue to fill up with homes displaying assorted design features from the past — instead of innovative contemporary designs.
“Somebody just needs to start building them,” he says. “And then people will buy them.”
At Robertson Simmons, it’s a general policy that the partners supervise the work on projects they have individually landed for the firm.
But the three all stress there’s little or no rivalry and that if one of them is extra busy, a project will be taken on by another partner.
“We’re impressed with each other whenever one of us pulls in a good project. We’ll say, ‘Wow, good for you,’ ” Simmons says.
“We all use each other’s projects to sell the firm. And in the end, it’s really the staff, not the partners, who do most of the work.”>>
>> Robertson closely follows the architectural scene, plus the careers of architects, past and present, whose work appeals to his sense of what he calls “the art of architecture.”
Two local buildings that speak to his passion for mid-20th century designs are the former Toronto-Dominion Bank (now a Crabby Joe’s restaurant) at King and Frederick streets in Kitchener and the original Waterloo Lutheran Seminary building on the campus of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo.
Martin says he, too, has a keen interest in design, but probably gets the greatest satisfaction in thinking through the technical details to produce a great package of drawings for the builder.
Simmons in recent months produced plans for the Blacksmith Lofts in Cambridge, an “adaptive reuse” project that saw the 19th-century Sheldon Fans factory at 28 Cedar St. in the Galt area converted to 27 condo units.
It has sold well for the three local business owners who jointly developed the project.
It’s easy from a distance to imagine such a project doesn’t require much design from the architect.
“But when you look at previous photos of the building, when it was an empty factory, and then look at what has been done, you can see better how challenging it would be,” Simmons says.
“In fact, it’s often harder than doing a new building.”
What gives him the most pleasure in his job, Simmons says, is helping people.
“Most people come to us almost helpless. They may own some property and they want to build a home or a building of some kind — and they just don’t know what the steps are.”
As an architect, he gets huge satisfaction in seeing how happy and amazed those clients become when they see what can be done.
“It’s wonderful, and it’s a new set of people each time you start a project. And it just keeps going each year.”