Tara Castator
Architectural Designer
WILLIAMSONWILLIAMSON is an award winning and internationally recognized architecture practice established in Toronto by Betsy and Shane Williamson in 2007. Our portfolio includes work ranging from master plans to furniture, all of which reflect a careful attention to detail regardless of scale or budget. Accordingly, we take great pride in our working relationships with clients, consultants, contractors, trades, and suppliers respective of our design approach that privileges contextual specificity and sustainable building strategies.
Multi-generational housing represents a growing thread in our work, particularly as families are confronting an increasingly unaffordable housing market in the city core. Readily configurable to allow for evolving and multiple blends of living arrangements, our house designs also recognize the possibilities of intensification latent in the morphology of Toronto’s urban fabric.
Our practice was founded on research that situates digital fabrication and wood construction in a broader cultural context. As such, we employ advanced digital tools as a means to critically engage traditional modes of construction and tectonic expression. Most recently we have embraced virtual reality platforms as a primary vehicle for design explorations and client engagement.
Our practice has strong ties to both the profession and academia. Betsy is the vice chair of the Waterfront Design Review Panel and co-founder of Building Equality in Architecture (BEA), an organization that promotes equality in the profession through advocacy, mentorship and networking. Shane is a tenured associate professor and former Director of the Master of Architecture Program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. Betsy and Shane are both Fellows of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC), an honour conferred on members singled out for their contribution to research, scholarship, public service or professional standing to the good of architecture.
Our work has been published widely including Architecture, Architectural Record, Azure, Canadian Architect, Domus, Dwell, I.D., and Metropolis and has been exhibited at the National Building Museum, Washington, DC; the Municipal Center for the Arts, New York, NY; Mercer Union, Toronto; Design Exchange, Toronto, ON; I-Space Gallery, Chicago, IL; the Urban Center, New York, NY; and the Corkin Gallery, Toronto, ON.
Our projects have received numerous awards from the Ontario Association of Architects, Ontario WoodWorks, the Canadian Wood Council, Canadian Architect, and Architect Magazine’s Residential Architect Design Awards. In addition, our practice has been awarded the the Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement and the Professional Prix de Rome for Architecture from the Canada Council of the Arts, the Emerging Architectural Practice Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada , the Young Architects Prize and the Emerging Voices Award from the Architecture League of New York.
