It was from trips to the North with her father Dale, a builder, that the young Eladia Smoke realized she wanted to become an architect.

“He would come back completely dejected because the quality of the housing was so poor and he knew the buildings he participated in would probably fail soon because the materials and designs were poor and the budgets weren’t there,” she recalls.

Today Smoke, principal and founder of Hamilton, Ont.-based Smoke Architecture, is hopeful the worst of architectural times are in the past, not only for residents of the North but in Canada as a whole.

“Our built environment has to step up its game,” she says, noting that carbon neutral, sustainability and net-zero themes are more in keeping with Indigenous design thinking but good architecture goes deeper than that.