As part of AN’s media collaboration with The Architectural League of New York, the March/April 2026 issue of The Designer’s Paperfeatures profiles of the League’s eight Emerging Voices winners. The biennial award recognizes the work of practices in the United States, Canada, and Mexico with unique design voices that concentrate on work beyond just architectural style. This month each of the companies will present their operate in a lecture series. Ahead of the online talks AN will present the company profiles online. Next up is D’Arcy Jones Architects, a Canada-based practice that will present its work on March 12. The complete list of winners can be found here and the calendar of lectures here.
On the surface, D’Arcy Jones Architects, led by Jones with a dozen or so staff in Vancouver, British Columbia, runs like other small firms: It takes on property work and renovation tasks, a few cultural and institutional commissions, and attempts its hand at competitions. Nevertheless, for Jones and those who experiment him, style work is just one part of the job. There are the weekly meetings, where personnel are encouraged to talk about whatever however the topic of architecture. And then there’s the strong focus the firm puts on research study, broadening its concentrate on studying materials and taking a look at theoretical and conceptual styles useful enough to be built. A number of the tasks D’Arcy Jones Architects deals with are extensions of this research-based technique. The company also has strategies to host conferences and begin its own internal press to publish books.
“We are growing to end up being a hybrid research-design office that I perhaps never ever set out to be, however it is just where my interests and people in the office’s interests lie,” Jones informed AN. “We’re not pleased to just get a new client style task. We want to talk about larger ideas.”
< img src ="https://www.archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/DArcy-Jones-Architects_260128_DJA-PHOTO-3.jpg"alt="A farmhouse in Agassiz, British Columbia "width="2048"/ > A farmhouse in Agassiz, British Columbia (Courtesy D’Arcy Jones Architects)
Among the firm’s bigger ideas is Jones’s present study of wood. Especially, the application of the material in the Middle Ages. A forthcoming book will publish his doctoral research study, which “challenges the conventions that limit creativity by satirizing architectural genuineness.”