Leckie Studio Architecture + Design

For Michael Leckie, “design is speculation and architects are speculators.” Leckie and his team focus on bringing optimism and hopefulness into creating their visions for spaces. This comes with a respect for the privilege of designing, which requires “mobilizing considerable resources for both ideation and realization.”

This sense of optimism led Leckie to found his eponymous firm at the mid-career age of 41. The advantage, he says, is that he had enough experience to start his practice with a clear sense of identity: he wanted to pursue a design approach based on rigour and subtraction. Leckie sees his work as embodying “an essentialist approach to a brief” rather than being focused on authorship. He insists with clients that design briefs are hyper clear, because “clarity lends itself to better collaboration.”

Now, almost 10 years later, with a team of nearly twenty, Leckie chuckles at the word “emerging,” wondering if being emergent ultimately comes down to being clear about what projects to turn down. He judges opportunities in terms of how they fit into a longer arc of work, rather than by their scale or typology.

One thread of this arc is an aesthetic one: Leckie Studio Architecture + Design projects have minimalist details, neutral tones and textures, and a somewhat sombre atmospheric effect. While the aesthetic is clearly contemporary, Leckie points to the Shaker movement and Canadiana camps and cabins as stylistic influences. This comes across most evidently in the private residential projects that represent a large portion of the studio’s work. Take, for instance, the Camera House in Pemberton Valley, the JRV house in Vancouver, or the in-progress OHR house on Hornby Island: despite very different massing and materials, their spaces are simple, yet warm, and always include framed views of nature.

A second, less evident thread lies in Leckie’s interest in prototyping. “It’s hard not to look at every project as a prototype,” he says. Rather than thinking of a project as singular and self-contained, he sees it as “a particular instance within a set of conditions” and asks himself: “What would the solution mean for a community, or a city, or the planet?”

This has led, on the one hand, to entrepreneurial ventures in prefabrication: The Backcountry Hut Company produces sustainable kitof- parts cabins, while TripTych proposes urban housing that is adaptable over time, evolving with owners (think multi-generational living) to promote gentle densification.

On the other hand, the firm is also taking on housing projects like the Winthorpe & Valentine prototype and the recent Broadway & Alma, both part of the City of Vancouver’s Moderate Income Rental Housing Pilot Program. Leckie Studio Architecture + Design also recently worked with the British Columbia Ministry of Housing to produce ten typological designs for their Standardized Housing Design Project—part of a catalogue of designs made available to the public free of charge.

 Melody Chen, David Gregory, Kelsey Wilkinson, Aldo Buitrago, Kate Read, Cameron Koroluk, Victor Firsov, Holden Korbin, Ian Lee, Irena Jenei, James Eidse, Emily Dovbniak, Denon Vipond, Johnathan Lum, Charlotte Kennedy, Alastair Bird, Ashley Hannon, Michael Leckie 

This profile is part of our October 2024 feature story, Twenty + Change: New Perspectives. 

As appeared in the October 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine