David Lasker Communications

09/26/2026

Every year, I have the pleasure of writing about winning projects and products in the Best of Canada Awards for Canadian Interiors magazine, where I previously served as Editor. Here are excerpts from the 2026 Awards issue:
• Baril Marie faucet: The minimalist, sculptural Platonic essence of the kitchen faucet.
• Keilhauer Unifi chair: “Picture a cushy sofa with biscuit-tufted (as in Mies’s iconic Barcelona chair) upholstery chopped into segments perching on spindly, Lunar Excursion Module legs.
• Nienkamper Una Collection: Leg warmers for table bases?
• Thom Fougere Studio G7 Tyndall Stone Tables: What marble is to Florence and travertine is to Rome, Tyndall stone is to Canada.
• Ancerl Studio Vanessa Courtyard: Barnhouse sensibility resulted in a primary suite with the bed beneath a 14-foot peaked ceiling.
• Alykhan Velji Designs Calgary House: Battered-wall arches connecting the spaces reinforce the monumentality theme.
• Dialog Berczy Square: Cascading planting adds a Hanging Gardens of Babylon note.
• Giannone Petricone Snider House: The principal suite unspools in plan like a ribbon.
• HOK Ontario Power Generation: Colossal, colorful statue columns—Ettore Sottsass’s vibrant ceramic Memphis totem poles on steroids—anchor the space.
• Izen Architecture House 71: Walls…incised with reveals for a meticulously tailored look.
• Level Studio Roncesvalles Loft: The existing stainless-steel island, which evoked an autopsy table, was replaced by an island surfaced in engineered quartz.
• Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec Niki de Saint Phalle exhibit: Tall, dancing voluptuously inflated Botero-esque figures in bright, psychedelic Peter Max hues.
• Partisans Muskoka Island Spa: An instant Stonehenge of tall sculptural split-stone slabs.
• Stark Architecture & Interiors Camp David Passive House: Perches on slanting Pick-up sticks à la Will Alsop’s Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art.

09/04/2026

About us: We come to PR with a journalism background, so we know what editors and reporters want.

09/04/2026

https://davidlaskercommunications.com/Architecture_1993_11_Ars_Civitas.pdf
In tribute to architect Barton Myers, who died on Aug. 11, and to his most-ambitious Canadian project, here is “Ars Civitas,” my cover story in the November 1993 issue of Architecture Magazine. It examines the 1993 expansion and renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), designed by Myers in association with Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects.

I saw the AGO as an architectural metaphor for Toronto itself: diverse, layered and accommodating diverse histories and identities. Just as Toronto is characterized by cultural pluralism, the Myers AGO harmonized architecture from different eras into a functioning whole. The project demonstrated that architecture can strengthen both a cultural institution and the civic life of a city

However, Myers’s work was cruelly short-lived. It was obliterated by Frank Gehry’s bigger, much more expensive grande projet that opened in 2008 and serenely floats—with its bowed, faceted, Douglas fir-and-glass façade evoking the Graf Zeppelin — along Dundas Street.

At the 2004 press conference for Gehry’s proposed renovation, I interviewed the starchitect. “I always thought of Barton Myers as a friend. He won’t talk to me anymore. I’ve had this happen to my buildings before; it’s progress. Barton will understand that.

“In the paper this morning, they had me trashing Barton. A few years from now, they’ll be trashing me. I didn’t want to touch Barton, I just wanted to hide it, but it didn’t work.”

Pressing my luck, when I asked what he most admired about Barton’s renovation, Gehry replied, “Oh, you’re bad! I wanted to keep all of Barton’s building and I wanted to go home.”

As for the Architecture Magazine feature story, I argued that the Myers-renovated AGO succeeded not merely as a museum expansion but as an act of urban architecture. Rather than imposing a single stylistic vision, Myers embraced the gallery's complex history and Toronto's diverse urban character, creating a building that functioned like a miniature city.

06/30/2025

Client: +VG Architects – The Ventin Group Ltd.
We procured an important press hit for our PR and photography client +VG Architects: Dave LeBlanc’s widely read Architourist column in The Globe and Mail, devoted to +VG’s 65 Delhi Street Transitional Housing Facility in Guelph, Ontario.
Notice, in the top photo, how we took advantage of the time of day and position of the sun to fill the otherwise boring, empty negative space of the lawn with the dramatic shadows of the tree branches. Evoking thick, masculine intertwining pythons, they counterpoint the delicate, lacy, feminine forms of the actual branches atop the photo. Together, the two masses frame the composition and move the eye toward the subject of the photo. View all our photos from the shoot at https://davidlaskerphotography.com/guelph-transitional....
The ribbon cutting earlier this year signified more than just a lucky break for the 28 adults who will live there for up to three years. Through the adaptive reuse of an esteemed but abandoned historical edifice, the project serves as a best-practices template for simultaneously solving two seemingly intractable municipal issues: repurposing disused or derelict heritage buildings while giving “a life” to homeless people. It is the prototype for a new building type, one with the gravitas and dignity of the original handful of civic institutions that define a community: city hall, courthouse, hospital, library and places of worship.

10/03/2022

10/01/2022

We’re proud to have shot the cover photo for the new, Sep/Oct issue of Retrofit Magazine, featuring the adaptive reuse of the Niagara Parks Power Station in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The cover story, “The pristine powerplant,” is another press hit in the PR campaign by David Lasker Communications with photography by David Lasker Photography. Congratulations to our client, +VG Architects, the project’s architect of record and contract administrator, and to Niagara Parks Commission for this 2021 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award-winning project. We are grateful to our strategic partner, Johanna Hoffmann of Oomph Group, who we invited to joint venture on the campaign.