Patricia Patkau
Vancouver, British Columbia
Patricia Patkau sees her practice as increasingly focused on “constructing relations between things,” as well as on the quality and craft of construction, and how these both affect the experience of inhabitation. Patkau Architects pursues “form finding,” in the vein of Frei Otto, as opposed to form-making, seeking forms that arise from the construction of “binding relations between the places we inhabit and our desires and needs as communities and individuals.” Their work, at both the domestic and public scales, is characterized by fitting itself into the situation, and they allow the design to emerge from “between the relationships and the material work.” For the Patkaus, the environment is not the “setting” for inhabitation; rather the environment and the inhabitant are unified in the experience of place. Their work exhibits both formal skill and intellectual rigor, and they engage in pure research that often redirects the trajectory of their practice. Their design process engages “building as a form of knowing,” and the works arise out of “a constant back and forth between construction and idea…with an attendant care and attention to the craft of the thing itself.”
