Despite recently winning the Lifetime Design Achievement Award at this year’s OAA Conference,
Housing: Pushing the Envelope in Niagara Falls, for his five decades of work, well-known Ottawa architect
Barry Hobin is not ready to call it quits.
The 74-year-old is still very much involved in the firm he started 45 years ago and that bears his name — Hobin Architecture — even if he no longer works five days a week.
“People ask me a lot about retirement,” he says on a sunny June morning in his office’s front boardroom in Little Italy. “How do you retire creativity? If you’re a writer like Margaret Atwood, do you think she would retire from writing? She’s probably retired from the rigour of writing. But she hasn’t retired from the notion of observing and then wanting to create around what she’s observed.”
Today, he’s more likely to balance the desire to dive personally into a project with mentoring the next generation and the judiciousness of overseeing and providing context, drawing on a collaborative approach that has long been a hallmark of the company’s philosophy. “Increasingly, I’m standing back and I’m trying to provide value-add as opposed to carrying the load.”
He’s very good at working with people, says retired architect Gord Lorimer, partner emeritus at Hobin Architecture and one of Hobin’s first employees. “He’s learned how to, over the years, design through the hands of others.”
Such is the prerogative of a seasoned veteran who has built one of Ottawa’s most successful architecture practices, now employing a staff of 45 and shaping the city’s built form in housing, commercial and institutional infrastructure.
Along the way, Hobin Architecture and its precursor, Barry J. Hobin & Associates Architects, have amassed a boatload of awards and accolades, designed more than 500 projects (and well over 17 million square feet) and gone above and beyond when it comes to giving back.
“(The firm) really contributed to building the city on pretty much every level,” notes Benjamin Gianni, who is an associate professor at Carleton University’s Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism as well as a friend and longtime colleague of Hobin’s.
The firm has designed many memorable buildings in Ottawa — the Rideau tower at Lansdowne Park, W.O. Mitchell Elementary School in Kanata, the Innovation Centre at Bayview Yards and the Ottawa Humane Society are among his favourites. But his roots are in designing homes. He’s partnered with builders and developers such as Charlesfort Developments, Uniform Developments, Taggart Group and eQ Homes, along with designing countless custom homes throughout the city. Less than five years after starting his own firm in 1979, it became common to boast that a home was Barry Hobin-designed when selling. (Just don’t ask him to pick a favourite home he’s designed. “There isn’t a house I go by that I don’t have a great sense of attachment to,” he says.)