Thirty years ago, Jane Thompson had just moved to Ottawa with her newborn daughter, wanting to find her place in the world of architecture.
From the time she was in school until she started her own firm in 1995, Thompson said she found architecture to be a tough gig for women.
“My older male bosses didn’t see me as equally capable (of) doing my work, no matter how hard I worked. That was part of why I started my firm, because it just felt like I wasn’t going to be respected,” she said.
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All the top architects were male, Thompson recalled, and she was often the only woman in the office.
Even as she built her business, Jane Thompson Architect, she said she began focusing on residential design as clients were “more likely to trust a woman with residential, home-based projects than commercial ones.”
“Not that that wasn’t what kind of work we wanted to do anyway, but I think we carved out a place (for ourselves) by being very supportive of the client rather than having a strong image ourselves,” she said.
Gender parity has improved, Thompson added, with many architecture firms now being woman-owned or, at least, having more than one female employee. But even today, people mistake Thompson’s female leadership team for men.
“We have three senior people in our office named Jane, Erin and Amie. Once a month, I’ll get one of us called James, Aaron or Eric and Arnie. Even today, when people see a female name in an email, they turn that in their heads into a male (name),” Thompson said.
And despite some progress, there is work left to do. Thompson said that a group called Building Equality in Architecture Capital Region (BEACAP) continues to advocate for equity in the industry in the national capital.
Weathering the storms
A graduate of the Waterloo School of Architecture in 1988, Thompson worked for about 10 different architects by the time she graduated and for a few years afterward. She started her firm in Ottawa in the ‘90s, all while caring for her children.
The firm started small, Thompson said, but she was eventually able to hire part-time students from Algonquin College and Carleton University.
“Over time, we grew a little bit. We started in my home. I had an addition built on the side of my house, then we moved to a real office about 15 years ago,” she said.
Though she had years of experience when she started her business, Thompson found it difficult to get going as her contacts and experiences from when she lived in Winnipeg “didn’t translate very well to Ottawa.”
Over the years, her firm had to diversify its services to weather economic uncertainty.
“Architecture firms are often the first ones to feel the pinch. We’ve had to keep ourselves relatively small and adjust (by) having a range of different projects. When new construction or commercial was down, we did more energy-efficiency and retrofits of houses,” she said.
Today, Jane Thompson Architect has grown and changed as much as the industry itself. For example, when she began, Thompson drew every design by hand – a far cry from the digital three-dimensional modelling used today.
Thanks to evolving technologies and hard work, she said she has been able to grow her business beyond the residential work she started with. Her portfolio now includes projects with the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum and the Central Experimental Farm as well as restaurants such as Tavern on the Falls, Tavern on the Hill and Tavern at the Gallery.
With a life-long passion for environmental studies, Thompson has also undertaken larger-scale projects, including conducting environmental research for the residential sector.
“(We’re) looking at how to build more efficiently. We’ve also looked at how to encourage lifestyle changes, which is another important part of creating less greenhouse gases,” she said.
Thompson was 11 years old when she first read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a book discussing the environmental harm caused by pesticides used by soldiers in the Second World War. The book led to her interest in working toward environmental solutions – something she has integrated into her architectural practice.
“Environmental concerns have changed. I was always very interested in environmental issues, even at school, but at that point it was more of a dream or a goal. It wasn’t a reality,” she said. “My particular interest was in consumption and how that affects the environment as well as the way we design houses and buildings.”
Other than the expansion in the project portfolio, Thompson said one of her firm’s successes over the past 30 years has been the relationship she has forged with her clients.
“(We) listen very carefully to what the client is looking for. Our style can range a lot from one project to another … We try to give people accurate pricing early on in the project, especially lately when construction costs have changed so dramatically. We try to be very responsible from a cost point of view, because there’s no point designing somebody’s dream and then discover that it’s twice as much as their budget,” she said.
As the firm looks toward the future, Thompson said it will be “an opportunity to look at where we’ve come and where we’re going.”
“I’m 63 now, so I have two very capable people in the office who are working together just to restructure that,” Thompson said.
