CSV Architects: foundation in Carleton University

CSV Architects has always had a strong connection with the School of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa.  A significant majority of the staff are graduates of its programs, and most of CSV’s founding partners were graduates, some of these having taught as sessional lecturers in the Design Studio.  Not as well known is the role of some of CSV’s founders in one of the School’s most notable programs and that the firm’s work and reputation has its roots in this history.

Carleton’s directed studies abroad programs

After completing his 2nd year of the Carleton Bachelor of Architecture program in the Spring of 1976, Anthony Leaning went to London, England with a referral from one of his professors to join the summer semester at the South Bank Polytechnic School of Architecture.  Later in July of that summer he was joined by his good friend and classmate Rob Froom for several weeks of travel in London England, the south of France, and to Barcelona.  In London, they toured the legendary Architecture Association school of architecture and enjoyed a couple of spectacular lectures by heady theorists, such as the likes of Archigram.

While Anthony remained in London that Fall for 1976-77 year of study at the Central Polytechnic School of Architecture, Rob returned to Carleton and year and together with classmates Rick Outhet and Dominique Renauld planned the first year of the long-running series of Carleton School of Architectures Directed Studies Abroad programs.  They broached the idea over scotch one evening with some professors including Michael Coote, who partly on the strength of this initiative soon after was named School Director,  and a plan was hatched.  Key to its success was a deal made with the University that in order to help with the academic cost of the semester away, tuition for that period at Carleton would be waived.

To fund-raise, they led the organization of an auction and party which was also the first of many annual fund-raisers that later morphed into Kosmic Kabaret, one of the premier party events on the Ottawa scene through the 80’s and 90’s. The excitement of the preparations for the up-coming studies abroad, along with well-timed visitor lectures from Richard Rogers (architect for Paris’s Centre George Pompidou) and others, resulted in that year’s studio producing some of the most creative output in memory.  Classmates Anne Beamish and Roydon Moran joined in the fundraising effort.  Carmen Corneil, the architect of the School building who came to Ottawa for the event declared that this was exactly the way that he had envisioned the building being used.

London semester at Architectural Association

The students decided on London’s Architectural Association (known as the AA) for a winter semester of study.  The director of the AA at that time was Alvin Boyarski, a pugnacious Canadian expatriate who had transformed the school into one of the international epicentres of architectural education and ideas. He was faced with the dual challenge of what to do with a group of students from a relatively unknown Canadian university and a renegade studio master Brian Anson, who had been fired from his job as lead architect for the redevelopment of London’s Convent Gardens district, for turning against it and mobilizing local citizens to fight the plan.

Impact on Alvin Boyarski and Brian Anson

In solving his problem, Boyarski’s decision to pair the students with Anson turned out to be a significant and formative moment for the students.  Anson immersed the studio in a world of social and architectural activism that took the group to a small town in Yorkshire in the north of the country that had fallen on hard times since the end of its Victorian heyday as a mill town.  After an introduction to the economic arc and decline of this area they developed their design projects within its partially abandoned industrial residue.  

Like others in the group who went on to careers that were undoubtably influenced by the AA experience (such as Joe Lobko and his Evergreen Brickworks and Artscape Wychwood Barns projects in Toronto), Rob Froom, Rick Outhet, and Anthony Leaning teamed up with others not long after graduation to form CSV Architects, which has gone on to developing a strong reputation for social responsibility, sustainability, and healthy communities in Ottawa.  That early experience in England provided one of the foundations of CSV’s work on affordable, seniors, and supportive housing; heritage conservation, adaptive re-use; community facilities, and child-care centres, and is reflected in the importance that CSV gives to designing all of its buildings to fit in and serve their community well.