Founded in 1981, Larkin Architect Limited (LAL) is an award-winning architectural practice celebrated for its expertise in community building, heritage restoration, and sustainable design. With a diverse portfolio spanning liturgical, educational, hospitality, healthcare, community, and residential projects, LAL pursues the sacredness of everyday life in each project.
Every project—whether a new building, adaptive reuse, renovation, or interior design—is seen as an opportunity to enhance our clients' ability to serve it's community. The practice's approach is grounded in the outcomes a space affects in the dignity of the human person, their communities, and the environment.
Larkin Architect Limited has developed an expertise in group facilitation and
collaboration tools, having worked with large and diverse volunteer committees on over 100 community-based projects that give tangible and meaningful expression to their mission and values in built form.
These tools are rooted in a genuine respect for dialogue. The resulting process results in a broadening of the vision through a plurality of voices and leads to enhanced “buy-in” from community stakeholders and supports the fundraising process as community members embrace the vision which they helped to generate.
Larkin Architect Limited is dedicated to the construction of sustainable built
environments. Small or large, LEED® credited goals or not, we approach all our projects with a serious eye towards sustainability and the long duration of the building’s service life. Seeking sustainable solutions that net our clients savings in operating costs over the long-term as well as limiting the project’s ecological footprint is the mandate of our office. We believe that in order to build truly sustainable buildings, they must be durable, easy to operate, and enjoyable to be in.
Communication and transparency in the design and construction process are critical to ensuring the community continues to feel ownership of the space and any modifications. At various stages of the design process we will use a variety of tools to engage the client team and enable them to become confident, qualified, key decision makers. Early in the design process, it is critical that everyone agrees to the foundational guiding principles and “big ideas”. Using a variety of graphic tools such as bubble diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps and room data sheets, we work to understand and integrate users’ quantitative and qualitative needs into
the proposed design.
Through our experience with heritage structures we have come to recognize the importance of designing in partnership with existing buildings; to work with its features and anticipate its limitations. We are able to actively move between these various approaches to work with existing structures to preserve and protect valuable elements, but also adapt and sensitively add to provide necessary modifications.