An architecture firm with offices across Canada and in the U.S. is opening a local studio near LeBreton Flats, where it hopes to be involved in future development.
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An architecture firm with offices across Canada and in the U.S. is opening a local studio near LeBreton Flats, where it hopes to be involved in future development.
“We’ve had people living in Ottawa since 2016 and we’ve been doing projects there since well before that,” said Dialog’s chair Antonio Gómez-Palacio. “Frankly, opening a studio was us catching up to the presence that we had there already.”
Plans to open a studio were delayed by the pandemic and remote work, he added. Next week, the firm will launch its Ottawa location at 6 Booth St., an office building on Albert Island within the Zibi development.
It will be Dialog’s sixth studio, with others in Calgary, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and San Francisco. The company has more than 600 staff across its offices, including 64 partners.
“We’re not a boutique firm running out of a single space,” said Gómez-Palacio. “I love our scale, because it means we can do really complex projects. We can do a hospital, we can do significant projects. We can be very selective around the projects that we do.”
Gómez-Palacio said Ottawa is “a window into the entire country,” with many national companies, organizations, and government departments headquartered in the city. Establishing a local presence, he said, opens up opportunities to connect with potential clients working on large-scale projects across the country.
Jie Chen, an architect and chair of the Ottawa studio, said the capital offers a variety of opportunities, with Dialog hoping to strengthen connections with key clients such as Public Services and Procurement Canada and the Department of National Defence.
Working across a range of disciplines, including urban design, engineering, landscape and interior design, Chen feels Dialog has something to offer.
“We have many collaborators and a lot of other consulting firms that have done amazing work in the National Capital Region, people who are our colleagues and friends,” said Chen. “But we do offer something different, which is an integrated design-focused practice. That model and that ecosystem don’t exist in the same form in Ottawa right now.”
Even before locating in the Ottawa market, Dialog has contributed to local projects, including uOttawa’s Advanced Medical Research Centre and modernization efforts at the Jeanne Mance Building on the Tunney’s Pasture campus.
Some of its biggest projects are ongoing. The modernization of the Lester B. Pearson Building is in its final phase, according to Chen. She said Dialog was involved in redesign efforts for three of the four towers, adding that the office buildings remained operational during the work, which presented unique challenges.
Planning for the project began a decade ago, before the pandemic. “We’ve had a lot of challenges and changes globally that have had a direct impact on this project,” Chen said. “It’s a project that was hugely complex, especially keeping in line with changes to work habits. It’s very interesting to follow along and see those adaptations happen as the project continues.”
Another more recent project was the Parliamentary Precinct redevelopment plan.
“(This is) hugely important nation-building work and a lot of the work touches directly on what Canada wants to be in the future,” said Chen. “These are just incredibly impactful projects that are very rewarding to be part of.”
Chen said the company is looking to contribute to other similar large-scale projects, and is monitoring federal investment in the defence sector and keeping a close eye on LeBreton Flats.
“We have actually been very intentional about the location of our studio,” said Chen. “It’s adjacent to LeBreton Flats and we see enormous opportunity and potential with how that site is being redeveloped, with the new library, a number of new towers going up and potentially the future arena.”
The company is also looking for more community-focused projects, including affordable housing, mixed-use, modular and inter-generational living developments. One such project that it has already worked on is the Heron Gate master plan, which will build more than 1,000 affordable housing units, mixed-use buildings, park space and active transit infrastructure.
“If Parliament Hill is a civic space for all Canadians, Heron Gate is a space for everyday life,” said Gómez-Palacio. “This was the reconfiguration of the neighbourhood from the perspective of community well-being. It (gave us) a significant understanding of how we can plan communities to be much more attuned with the well-being of individuals, of families and of the community as a whole.”
He added, “We’re terribly excited about it all. Our job is to look at the future, imagine it can be brighter, then help communities and our clients get to that space. The thing that keeps us excited in Ottawa is we think this is a place where we can do great work.”
Dialog’s Ottawa office will have 20 employees and expects to hire in the coming weeks.
“We don’t see other people in the consulting industry as our competition, but as people that we will work with,” Chen said. “I really think that the embrace of us into the design ecosystem in Ottawa has been overwhelmingly positive and I want us to continue building that momentum.”
