NO MEAN CITY: A two-faced house and a big architectural award

Cross-posted from No Mean City, Alex’s personal blog on architecture.

I wrote two weeks ago for The Globe and Mail about Janus House — a contemporary renovation and add-on to a Victorian in Cabbagetown. The architects, NMinusOne, restored the interior of the original house in a sympathetic way — and then tacked on a radically contemporary, wide-open glass-and-steel box to the back. It’s a bold move by the architects and the owners, and they’ve done an amazing job of executing it.

NMinusOne’s two partners, Christos Marcopoulos and Carol Moukheiber, teach at University of Toronto and run the Responsive Architecture at Daniels centre — studying how to embed computing power into building, furniture, even (!) textiles.

They just won a very prestigious award: they’ve been named to this year’s Emerging Voices by the Architecture League of New York. This means they’ll give a talk at the League’s offices next month, and join the company of the best and most innovative architects of the last generation, like Thom Mayne James Corner.

Congratulations to them.

Among the other winners this year’s Emerging Voices: the Winnipeg firm 5468796. Two members of that collective are curating the Migrating Landscapes show, running through the end of this week at Brookfield Place. More on that in a separate post.