We design cities to activate public life
PUBLIC WORK is a design-driven practice engaged in building the contemporary city. Our work within urban contexts hinges on a necessarily comprehensive view of the spatial, social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the city. At the core of our practice is one question: How can every urban project—public or private—contribute to the quality of life and urban experience in the city?
We aim for transformational contributions to the public realm
The practice of PUBLIC WORK draws upon the rich history of city building to advance contemporary solutions for urban environments. Our work reconsiders the relationship of civic infrastructure, landscape, architecture, context, and experience in search of innovative contributions to the city and its public realm. We bring imagination, optimism, skill, and pragmatism to overcome the complex and sometimes overlapping challenges of working in urban environments.
We are pragmatic and contextual
Using landscape as our primary medium, our projects aim to enhance the often hidden qualities of a site to produce a transformed experience of even the most familiar places. Our work combines traditional and progressive approaches to landscape, ecology, urbanism, and infrastructure design and balances the strategic demands of delivering complex projects with an experiential approach to the design of the public realm. We seek contextually driven site strategies to optimize natural and engineered systems, maximize public investment, and transform experience of place.
We collaborate for maximum impact
Our approach is based on a fundamentally open collaboration with the engineers, architects, specialists, clients, stakeholders, and contractors who design and build the cities we live in. Through these engagements as well as ongoing research through practice, we continually seek opportunities to improve the design and delivery of urban projects—offering strategic cost efficiencies, enhanced performance, and a deepened public experience.
We think and work across scales and disciplines
Under the leadership of founding partners Marc Ryan and Adam Nicklin, PUBLIC WORK is represented by a core team of designers, each with diverse backgrounds and extensive experience in the design and implementation of urban projects across a range of scales. Working collaboratively in the studio, we explore the most challenging and relevant contemporary urban questions in search of thoughtful and meaningful design responses – conceptually in our visions and physically in our built work.
Leadership
Marc Ryan and Adam Nicklin co-founded PUBLIC WORK following their six-year collaboration as leaders in the planning, design, and implementation of the West 8 + DTAH master plan for Toronto’s Central Waterfront between 2006-2012. The launch of PUBLIC WORK in 2012 coincided with a unique moment in the city’s ongoing development: The rediscovery of the public realm amidst rapid urban growth. Our shared vision for the practice of PUBLIC WORK is based upon seeking to articulate the public dimension in the spaces, places, ecologies, infrastructures and built forms that collectively define our experience of urban life.
