As part of AN’s media partnership with The Architectural League of New York, the March/April 2026 issue of The Architect’s Newspaper features profiles of the League’s eight Emerging Voices winners. The biennial award recognizes the work of practices in the United States, Canada, and Mexico with distinct design voices that focus on work beyond just architectural design. This month each of the firms will present their work in a lecture series. Ahead of the online talks AN will roll out the firm profiles online. Next up is D’Arcy Jones Architects, a Canada-based practice that will present its work on March 12. The full list of winners can be found here and the calendar of lectures here.
On the surface, D’Arcy Jones Architects, led by Jones with a dozen or so staff in Vancouver, British Columbia, operates like other small firms: It takes on residential work and renovation jobs, a few cultural and institutional commissions, and tries its hand at competitions. However, for Jones and those who practice with him, design work is just one part of the job. There are the weekly meetings, where staff are encouraged to discuss everything but the topic of architecture. And then there’s the strong emphasis the firm places on research, expanding its focus on studying materials and examining theoretical and conceptual designs practical enough to be built. Many of the projects D’Arcy Jones Architects works on are extensions of this research-based approach. The firm also has plans to host conferences and start its own in-house press to publish books.
“We are growing to become a hybrid research-design office that I maybe never set out to be, but it is just where my interests and people in the office’s interests lie,” Jones told AN. “We’re not satisfied to just get a new client design project. We want to talk about bigger ideas.”
Among the firm’s bigger ideas is Jones’s current study of wood. Particularly, the application of the material in the Middle Ages. A forthcoming book will publish his doctoral research, which “challenges the conventions that limit creativity by poking fun at architectural sincerity.”
The firm’s inception in 1999 was just as unconventional as its current operations. The first project Jones worked on, in between finishing his bachelor’s in environmental design and a master’s degree in architecture, was a house for family. He spent 15 years doing design work before setting out to get licensed. In the interim, he hired licensed architects as consultants on his projects. It took his staff seeking licensure themselves to persuade Jones to ultimately go for it himself.
He got his start in architecture taking on residential commissions, and today, housing projects still make up the bulk of the firm’s oeuvre. Jones told AN the firm is currently working on 20 to 25 projects, all within a 10- to 15-minute walk from each other. It also recently wrapped work on a private art gallery on Hornby Island in Canada.
Jones sees the houses his practice works on as a “reflection” of the clients’ personalities. “The ones that are rough and rugged, those people are outdoorsy. And other people put on makeup for breakfast; you get the sense they want something finer,” he said. “So those differences you can see between all our work that’s from the client. It’s almost like the house is a portrait of them.”
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