Housing | Stacked Townhouse Study
Designing with tenacity and foresight.
Together, we’ll create spaces that reflect the values of your community, persevere through change, and leave a positive impact long after opening day. Public investment leaves a legacy, so we maximize your budget while making every room, lobby, and green space count.
Sectors We Serve
Civic
Field houses, plazas and recreation centres are places for socializing, protest, and ceremony—where community coalesces. We bring curiosity to civic projects, designing to encourage interaction and the natural exchange of ideas.
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Commercial
A well-designed work environment shapes how people feel and collaborate. That’s why we bring the same rigor and social intelligence from our public work to commercial projects—because culture starts with the space that you build it in.
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Cultural
Public plazas, lobbies, and exhibition spaces hold the stories a community wants to share. PUBLIC has designed interpretive environments from Vancouver, Canada to Nome, Alaska, with a belief that how we frame history and who we center in it matter deeply.
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Education
We design for the full continuum of human development: from early child care and elementary education through secondary and post-secondary learning. Our environments optimize the intellectual, social and physical flourishing of students, staff, and the broader community.
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Housing
From Passive House student residences to mixed-use affordable housing for Métis Nation communities, we design homes that are resilient, sustainable, and built for the long arc of people's lives. We work closely with diverse community partners—non-profit housing operators, post-secondary institutions, researchers and development consultants—to advance resilient community infrastructure.
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Interiors
We are committed to directing our energy to a more sustainable and just world, designing spaces that tangibly elevate life quality. Our design approach is welcoming, equitable, barrier-free, and sustainable. Wherever possible, we use natural finishes and provide access to sunlight, fresh air, and green space.
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Research
With creativity and optimism, we contribute original research to the built environment. Many of our projects are learning labs, embodied solutions for Passive House, mass timber economics, pre-fabrication, and code reform. Together, we’re advancing community-serving architecture.
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Woodlab
With a dozen completed mass timber projects, we continue to push the limitations of this expressive material even further. Our explorations add to the known benefits of occupant wellbeing, construction efficiencies, and sustainability.
EXPLOREOur Services
Architecture
PUBLIC delivers full architectural services—from feasibility studies through to built form, with an eye to social impact and long-term resilience. We bring the same collaborative rigour to a park pavilion as to a 300-unit affordable housing tower.
Building Performance
We harmonize BC Energy Step Code, mass timber, and pre-fabrication solutions that reduce environmental impact while maintaining livability as seen in the design of the affordable housing prototype for BC’s DASH program and Canada's first Passive House–certified student residence.
Interior Design
We design interiors that feel purposeful and alive. From university lobbies rooted in xʷməθkʷəy̓əm history to improving the experience of tenants in a Fortune-500 downtown tower, we consider how light, material, and layout inform people's lives.
Planning & Urban Design
We approach planning as a social practice, working with communities and institutions to think carefully about how sites, campuses, and neighbourhoods can grow with integrity.
Public Engagement
We believe that the people most affected by a project deserve a meaningful seat at the table. Our engagement process creates space for honest dialogue, dignity, and community voices.
Research & Strategy
Standout work begins with curiosity and a willingness to ask good questions. We have completed original research on single-stair code reform, mass timber economics, housing typologies, and residential shading, contributing to design with evidence-based thinking.
Signage & Wayfinding
A well-designed wayfinding system helps people feel at home in a place they've never been before. We have developed signage and wayfinding for campuses, transit facilities, and civic spaces—creating remarkable systems that are clear, considered, and true to place.
