Elsa Lam is the Editor at Canadian Architect, a national review of design and practice for architects and related professionals. She focuses on themes of architecture and planning, as well as construction and real estate, contributing her expertise to the discourse surrounding these vital fields. Elsa's work has been featured in the Toronto Star and Canadian Architect magazine.
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Elsa's coverage mainly focuses on architecture and design, with a specific emphasis on Canadian architecture. She also covers government announcements and expert commentary related to architectural developments.
For effective outreach, consider pitching experts or professionals in the field of architecture who can provide insights into Canadian architectural projects, trends, or industry-related events. This could include architects, urban planners, or academics with expertise in Canadian architecture.
Given Elsa's focus on press releases and government announcements relating to architectural developments, she may be interested in receiving pitches that offer exclusive access to upcoming projects or insider perspectives from industry leaders.
Additionally, given her coverage of cultural and societal themes alongside design topics such as community centers and indigenous architecture, consider reaching out with stories that highlight the intersection of these subjects within the realm of Canadian architecture.
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By: Elsa Lam
Co-edited by Leila Marie Farah (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Samantha L. Martin (University College Dublin), and published by Leuven University Press, the book Mobs and Microbes: Global Perspectives on Market Halls, Civic Order, and Public Health presents new research on market halls, crossing between architectural history, urban history, and urban studies.
As Chief Planning and Design Officer at Waterfront Toronto, Christopher Glaisek has overseen the design of all major developments and landscape projects on the waterfront, directing planning and urban design efforts on 2,000 acres of waterfront property for over 20 years. He has been a passionate advocate for architecture, landscape and urban design excellence throughout this work. Under Glaisek's stewardship, Waterfront Toronto has received more than 100 national and international design awards.
Opened in 1969 and among the last of Canada's Centennial projects, the Ontario Science Centre is an architectural masterpiece that has touched the lives of millions of young Canadians. Designed by Japanese-Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama (1929-2023), who went on to earn the RAIC's Gold Medal in 1997, the centre's quiet strength derives from Moriyama's interest in eastern philosophy. From the entrance (substantially renovated in 1996 with the addition of an IMAX theatre), visitors cross a soaring bridge, before entering a series of trefoil-shaped galleries that guide visitors down into the ravine below. The centre's architecture unfolds over what Moriyama called a “seven-stage sequence of experience,” meant to psychologically prepare visitors as they move from the mundane to the fantastical, with opportunities for quiet breaks and contemplative views between. Not a few parents have been bemused to watch the piercing mania of rainy-day weekends and school trips give way to mesmeric gazing, as children ride silently aboard escalators and look out over the forest floor.
By: Elsa Lam
Canadian cities host two kinds of universities: historical institutions founded around the nineteenth century, and modern ones established soon after 1945. The latter embodied the Canadian welfare state's growing ambition, as government largesse in the postwar decades expanded postsecondary education—first for returning veterans and then in relation to phenomena including increasing suburbanization and rising immigration.
Lalme' Iwesawtexw (Seabird Island Community School) stands as a landmark project in the evolution of Indigenous education and architecture in Canada. Designed by Vancouver-based Patkau Architects, the school was completed in the early 1990s for a Coastal Salish community near Agassiz, British Columbia.
Vancouver-based MOTIV Architects was co-founded by architects Tracey Mactavish and Asher deGroot in 2017. In the past nine years, the firm has evolved as a practice structured around positive environmental and social impact as its primary motivator. The practice, write Mactavish and deGroot, is “designed to tackle the issues that we believe are most relevant to humanity's very sustainability on the planet; namely resilience and climate change and the importance of local food security and sovereignty, housing affordability, and the active sharing of knowledge and lived experience.”
A redeveloped pier offers recreational and museological space connecting downtown Nelson, BC, to its waterfront.
By: Elsa Lam
A striking new sports facility combines an Olympic-standard velodrome track with community recreation programs.
This month's Viewpoint is excerpted from editor Elsa Lam's convocation remarks to the 2026 graduating class of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
At the eastern edge of Vancouver's Granville Island—a dense tangle of industrial buildings rendered into a lively marketplace and artisan hub in the early 1980s—a place of quiet stands out. This building, like many of its neighbours, is clad in corrugated metal and assembled from shipping containers. But a gently uplit wood slat wall, fronted by a spray of ornamental grasses, hints at something different inside.
