Larry Richards

Larry Wayne Richards is a Professor Emeritus and former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty Of Architecture, Landscape, and Design that served between 1997-2004. Richards received his BArch in 1967 from Miami University and went on the work with The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts until 1971. At TAC he was a member of the design team for major cultural and institutional buildings which include the American Institute of Architects headquarters in Washington, D.C. and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. After a year in Florence, Italy, Richards completed a post-professional MArch at Yale University between 1973-1975 under the tutelage of Charles Moore, Vincent Scully, and James Stirling.


Richards immigrated to Canada in 1975 and went on to teach at the Technical University of Nova Scotia (now Dalhousie University) for five years. In Halifax, he established the experimental studio, NETWORKS, with Eric Fiss, Brian MacKay-Lyons, and Frederic Urban, and a monograph was published by Tech-press: Larry Richards: Works, 1997-1980. NETWORK's Lyons Tower project was published in Domus in 1980.

Richards taught at the University of Toronto between 1980-1981 before his appointment as director of the University Of Waterloo School of Architecture which lasted between 1982-87 and where he continued as professor for ten years. In 1997 he returned to the University of Toronto as dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Richards was instrumental in restructuring the Faculty's academic programs and authored a comprehensive guidebook on the university’s architecture (University of Toronto: A Campus Guide, Princeton Architectural Press; first edition 2009, second edition 2018). As dean, Richards strongly advocated for both progressive architecture and historical preservation and served on the board of the Ontario Heritage Trust for nine years.

In publications like AZURE, Impulse, Canadian Architect, Canadian Art, Parachute, and Trace, Richards has published a substantial amount of writing on Canadian architecture. He co-edited Toronto Places: A Context for Urban Design (with Marc Baraness, University of Toronto Press, 1991) and edited the 1989 book on the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (CCA: Building and Gardens, MIT Press). He has written about American-Canadian architect Frank Gehry's work for the Art Gallery of Ontario, and he will soon pen a chapter on postmodern architecture in Canada for Princeton Architectural Press's book "Postmodernism: Reconnecting with History, Memory, and Place."

Richards has completed more than thirty exhibitions in his capacity as a curator and designer. For two Canadian exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including "RECIPROCITY: Patkau + 16" in 1996, he served as both curator and designer. At the Eric Arthur Gallery, he showed "Maple Leaf Gardens: From Hockey Heaven to Superstore" in 2004. Additionally, in 2006, he organized and created "Frank's Drawings: Eight Museums by Gehry" for the Patricia Faure Gallery in Los Angeles and the University of Toronto Art Centre.

Richards and Kin Yeung, a fashion designer and real estate entrepreneur based in Hong Kong, co-founded WORKShop, Inc. in 2008. WORKshop was a gallery, retail store, and design research centre with a location at 80 Bloor Street West in Toronto. Up until 2016, Richards was the creative director at WORKshop. Richards provided consulting services for Kin Yeung on on a wide range of architecture and urban design projects in Canada, China, and the US between 2008 and 2016.

Among Richards' professional affiliations, he is an international member of the American Institute of Architects and a fellow in the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In 2007 Richards received the RAICs national Advocate for Architecture award. He has been a guest critic at Cornell University, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, the University of California (UCLA), and Yale University. Conceptual projects and drawings by Richards have been acquired by museums and research centres, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the Clark Art Institute.

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