Office for Responsive Environments

The Office for Responsive Environments (ORE) brings together professionals with deep experience in building cities, to engage in projects to build more responsive urban infrastructure, public open space and landscapes. A multidisciplinary approach allows us to reach across professional jurisdictions in order to broaden the repertoire of skills and ideas, expand possibilities and increase the value achieved through all stages of project design and delivery. Working together, we create the opportunity for greater innovation, and for the evolution of ideas to occur outside of disciplinary assumptions and restrictions.

Clients of ORE access the experience and creative vision of our principals and their respective firms, including Brown + Storey Architects Inc. and Lisa MacTaggart Landscape Architect, as well as a network of specialists in engineering, planning, community relations and the arts. Our repertoire includes major public squares, parks and streetscapes; play areas and roof gardens; industrial and commercial buildings; installation art and interior design. Our specialty is in recovering untapped space, leveraging civic infrastructure, and strengthening community and ecological assets; our designs achieve more flexible, livable and resilient parks and public spaces.

Community Engagement

Community support and engagement are key to our practice. Our team works to address the objectives of existing stakeholders and to make places that can accommodate and benefit a broader audience of visitors than they did before. We create and improve open spaces to serve both their own immediate neighbourhoods and to fit into today’s notion of the ever-expanding ‘local’ environment.

ORE and its Communications and Consultation Lead Josh Fullan specialize in the use of innovative methods to engage populations not usually reached by planning, design, and development processes. All members of the ORE team play an active and ongoing role in the community consultation process, as we understand the economic and social value of meaningful and sustained engagement with city and university stakeholders.

Our communications approach focuses on consistent and realistic messaging while building trust, excitement, and a sense of local pride in the projects we work on. One of our strategic strengths is in identifying key allies within a community and then working closely with them throughout the consultation and communication processes in order to leverage their existing knowledge and authentic experience of place.