Studio
Omar Gandhi Architects (OG) was founded in 2010, and has design studios in Toronto and Halifax, Canada. The internationally honoured practice has produced a portfolio of architecture and other designed products for projects ranging from homes and innovative urban in-fills to medium and large-scale public works, and historic landscapes.
Gandhi and his highly collaborative OG team create architecture that responds in often remarkable ways to design briefs. ‘There is a sense of play and the unexpected in key parts of our designs,’ explains Gandhi. As a result, each scheme is unique and surprising in form and interiors, and in the way materials are expressed.
‘Our designs are based on the physical characteristics of individual sites and the historically familiar architecture in a given area,’ he says. ‘And we then create evolutions or abstractions of the usual associations between buildings, sites, topography and other environmental phenomena. We are exploring and designing new ways to experience these things.’
In essence, OG’s approach is to unravel clients’ briefs as creatively as possible, absorb the physical and environmental characteristics of individual sites, and then design architecture that boldly reinvents the familiar forms and materials of established building types or settings. These formal and spatial originalities are accentuated by superbly crafted materials and meticulous refinements of architectural detail.
The practice’s critically acclaimed work continues to attract ambitious clients, and this has been key to architecturally sophisticated projects such as the Schlotfeldt Residence in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, the Rabbit Snare Gorge cabin in Nova Scotia, and OG’s remarkable landform-like intervention at the historically important Peggy’s Cove site in Nova Scotia.
OG’s architecture has generated international praise and academic recognition. The practice’s honours include the Canada Council for the Arts Professional Prix de Rome, Architectural Record Magazine’s 2018 Design Vanguard, and the Canadian Governor General’s Medal in Architecture. Omar Gandhi was a Louis I. Kahn visiting Assistant Professor in Architectural Design at the Yale School of Architecture and was named among Monocle magazine’s Most Influential Canadians.
