Gregory Henriquez , BArch / 87

Gregory Henriquez is an architect best known for the design of several community-based mixed-use and social housing projects in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. He is currently in charge of the socially inclusive Woodward’s Redevelopment, the largest mixed-use project in the history of Vancouver. Henriquez’s expresses his belief that meaningful architecture must be a poetic expression of social justice in his book Towards an Ethical Architecture, in which the urgent need to reexamine the role of ethics, activism and critical commentary in architectural practice is discussed.In 2010, he released Body Heat: The Story of the Woodward’s Redevelopment, a book about the largest mixed-use project in Vancouver’s history.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton, Henriquez attended the Master of Architecture Program at McGill University in 1988, which awarded him an honorary degree in history and theory of architecture in 2007. He has won four B.C. Lieutenant-Governor’s Awards, in 2004 received a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture for the Lore Krill Housing Co-operative and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2007, he was elected as Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. He received a 2009 Award of Excellence from Canadian Architect.

“What did the professors at Carleton teach us? They taught us about the history of architecture and how the profession has come to its current state of collective amnesia. Our new director Alberto Pérez-Gómez created an environment where we were encouraged to learn from the past, to trust our embodied experience of the world, to explore our own stories and to find an authentic expression beyond style and conventional archetypes. The process from intention to drawing, drawing to model and model to the ultimate naming of the work was taught with rigour and devotion.”