Studio

Notice the door, made of solid wood with a brass handle that in time will be, as Juhani Pallasmaa wrote, “shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us.” Fifty years on, a building should feel better for its age.

Pay attention to the parts of a building that a photograph cannot show: the weight of the door, the warmth of sunlight through glass, the coolness of a stone-walled room.

Micacchi Architecture Inc. is a Toronto practice led by Robert Micacchi, established in 2017.

Our work ranges from private houses and renovations to multi-unit residential and commercial buildings, in Ontario, Turkey and China. For larger projects we carry the work from rezoning and site plan approval through permit and construction, with the same attention to design at every stage.

We work in small teams, with the client close to every decision. Design is iterative. The program is tested and refined through drawing and modelling rather than fixed at the outset, so that what gets built is the result of many rounds of revisions. We work in Archicad, a building information modelling platform, alongside hand drawing, 3D visualization and virtual reality.

Robert studied architecture at the University of Waterloo and was awarded the Rome Prize on graduation, given for the highest overall studio standing across the undergraduate degree. He worked in London, Vancouver and Toronto, including at Diamond Schmitt Architects, where he worked on the Robarts Library addition, and at Tact Architecture, where as project lead under Prishram Jain he directed rezoning applications for high-rise condominium buildings. He founded the practice in 2017.