Don An wants to make some academic noise in the design industry. The intern architect’s portfolio includes managing billion-dollar projects in China, winning a design competition for Jeunes sans Frontires (a French-language public secondary school in Brampton, Ont.) and working as a key designer on the schematic design for the notable – and perhaps now infamous – Federal Building redevelopment project in Edmonton. However, it is his newest, small-scale design venture that he hopes will get people in the industry talking about Abax Designer Homes Inc., where he is a director.
It is impossible to drive down a particular Ritchie-area street, just south of Whyte Avenue and east of 99th Street, without noticing An’s towering minimalist black and white duplexes, which stand loud and proud against the small post-war bungalows that inhabit most of the street. The infill project, titled House Monochrome – Positive/Negative, offers a study not only in contrast, but also in simplicity, the primary driver behind An’s design choices. “I set a rule,” says An, who has previously worked for two well-known architecture firms, Stantec and Kasian. “The rule is simplicity. If I can achieve my goal with one line, I won’t do it with two lines.”
Though clean, sparse architecture now rules his design aesthetic, An was originally inspired to become an architect after seeing the visually complex and dynamic works of artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello Sanzio and Hans Holbein. He fondly remembers a set of three books, Sketches by Renaissance Masters, that he purchased in his early teens for a whopping 0.45 Chinese yuan renminbi (less than US$0.09) each.
“My parents, who were both structural engineers, had a combined monthly income of about 121 renminbi,” says An, whose family was among the many who were poor in post-Cultural Revolution China. “What I spent on those tiny books was almost one per cent of our household income at the time.” An still has them.