RVTR is a design research practice with studios based in
Toronto, Ontario and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Our work operates across scales
to position design as an active agent in continually evolving ecologies. Our
projects range from the visioning of the urban future of regional territories,
to high performance building design, to prototype-based research in responsive
envelope systems and to digitally crafted objects. These operational scales are
tied together through a methodology that entails a systems based approach: one
that assembles around each project a multiplicity of agents, forces and
contexts and that actively leverages these multivalent and sometimes
contradictory agents to drive new potentials for the work.In order to approach these complex issues, RVTR operates
simultaneously as a professional architecture practice and as an academic
and experimental research platform. Since our inception in 2007, the three
directors – Geoffrey Thün, Kathy Velikov and Colin Ripley – have worked to blur
boundaries between these two aspects of design practice. Our studio
environments operate as experimental think tanks - horizontally organized to
engage the full breadth of our team’s input in each facet of project development.
RVTR also regularly collaborates with broad multidisciplinary teams of
academic, scientific and industry partners enabling a deep and informed
approach to integrated design.RVTR has received numerous awards including a Royal
Architectural Institute of Canada Award of Excellence for Innovation in
The Practice of Architecture (2011), an R&D Award from Architecture
Magazine (2010), the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture from the Canada
Council for the Arts (2009), the Architectural League Prize for Young
Architects + Designers (2008). The work has been exhibited and widely published
internationally.