The Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 includes Place of Work, a young practice out of Canada, which joins our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

With two bases, in Halifax and Toronto, Canada, this young studio was only founded four years ago by architects Jennifer Esposito, Duncan Patterson, and Will Perkins. The trio enjoy taking their cues from each project’s context and the region’s vernacular, just as much as they do from the everyday experience, they explain. ‘Ordinary things excite us,’ they say. ‘The way light angles across a wall. The sound a door makes when it closes. The coolness of stone under bare feet. We’re drawn to these specifics because they contain what is essential: ritual, site, material, time.’

Bridging the gap between ‘representation and reality,’ the real and the imaginary is ‘where architecture happens,’ they add. Place of Work may still be emerging, but it has a range of ongoing projects across Atlantic Canada and Ontario. It consciously picks commissions that allows them to work closely with clients and get stuck into the particulars and the detail in each and every design, the team emphasises.

Yet if you ask what the architects primary references are, the discussion comes back to context and setting. ‘[Our biggest influence is] Place. Not as a romantic idea, but as a physical and cultural reality that architecture either responds to or ignores. Architecture requires deep listening. Climate, topography, material culture, and history are forces that shape our approach. But place doesn’t mean anything without people. What we share is a belief that architecture begins with human ritual: how people wake, gather, retreat, and rest.’