Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Episodes in Public Architecture By Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Architect Andrew Frontini’s recent book is a hybrid between monograph and memoir. The book presents 11 projects completed over the course of Frontini’s career at the Toronto branch of Perkins&Will. Interspersed among glossy colour photos of each project are pamphlet-like inserts with Frontini’s candid musings about the process of the project’s making and lessons learned. The case studies trace Frontini’s career back to being an upstart at Shore Tilbe Irwin & Partners, the firm that would later become Perkins&Will’s Toronto office. In an “act of total insubordination,” he and colleague Marc Downing “hijacked the design concept” for the Whitby Library and Civic Square competition, developing a modernist composition framing a town square instead of the centrally placed basilica-and-rotunda scheme they had been instructed to execute—and winning the job. As his career evolved, Frontini reflects on how evolved from being the singular “hand” behind a design to a team leader, the “watcher of hands.” This is especially evident in Dawes Road Library, a project now entering construction, designed in collaboration with Eladia Smoke of Smoke Architecture. Deeply informed by dozens of conversations and hundreds of individuals, the building will be draped in a curved cladding evocative of an Indigenous star blanket—which, as Frontini explains, is a traditional “gift made and bestowed by the community for valuable work that benefits the community.” Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) Nuggets of wisdom and insight pepper the other stories in this book. The high-pressure, high-stakes work that went into the design-build for the University of Toronto Mississauga Instructional Centre—a mere 22 months from project award to completion—is a thrilling tale. I recalled observing from the sidelines, in 2013, a dust-up between Phyllis Lambert and Perkins&Will over the firm’s redesign of Arthur Erickson’s Bank of Canada headquarters; here, the full story is recounted from Frontini’s perspective. Episodes in Public Architecture by Andrew Frontini (ORO Editions, 2025) In several of the projects presented, Frontini’s propensity for storytelling wins the day. A bit of narrative stagecraft—curating Perkins&Will’s Dupont Street studio as a gallery showcasing key elements of its approach—helped gain the firm the initial commission for Toronto Metropolitan University’s Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex. A wooden model based on a Japanese puzzle-box gives the head librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga a proposal that she can sell to other stakeholders. Frontini’s narrative skills shine in this book, too: his texts bring his projects to life, taking readers along on the sometimes-fraught adventures that resulted in the successful creation of these dozen buildings. The post Book Review: Episodes in Public Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.