Courtesy of the Sai-Chew family As every architect knows, architecture is a team sport, and few architects have been better team players than Dick Sai-Chew. As a job captain at Thompson Berwick & Pratt and later The Thom Partnership, he helped oversee the creation of some of the country’s most complex architectural commissions, including the B.C. Electric Building, Trent University, and Shaw Festival Theatre. Sai-Chew was born in Vancouver in 1928, and was raised by his father, a Chinese immigrant who worked as a chef. He never knew his mother. “He was a very loving father, but we never discussed my mother,” recalled Sai-Chew in a 2021 interview with this writer. “It was only years later when my wife, Susan, asked him point blank:  ‘What nationality was Dick’s mother?’ And it was then that he said, for the first time, ‘Oh, she was Swedish.’” He grew up in the city’s Chinatown district, at a time when the city around him was rife with racism. “The best thing my dad ever did for me, other than caring for me, of course, is take me to China when I was seven years old,” recalled Sai-Chew in a 2021 interview with me. “I had just started grade two and he took me to South China, to the Taishan District in Guangdong, where I met my relatives there and absorbed the culture.” He and his father stayed in China for three years. “To be of mixed race, you could always be torn: who are you? But I felt I was Chinese, and that’s because of my father taking me to China for those years, so I could speak Cantonese and the village dialect.” Courtesy of the Sai-Chew family Back in Vancouver, Sai-Chew finished his schooling, and found woodworking to be his favourite subject. “So I decided, without knowing what architecture was, that I would be an architect. Working with wood, with your hands and directly with the materials, that’s what appealed to me. I didn’t think about the design so much.” He enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s fledgling School of Architecture, then headed by its founding director, Fred Lasserre. But Lasserre, a Swiss-born European modernist, did not make a strong impression on Sai-Chew. “You could tell he wanted everything to be clean, in a grid, all boring as hell! That was not a design-inspiring attitude to instill in a young architect,” he recalled many decades later. After his 1952 graduation, his first job was with a local firm headed by an English architect.  “After a while, I thought to myself: This is a dead end, working in this atmosphere. Then I got a job with a structural engineer, who was a consultant to Thompson Berwick and Pratt,” Vancouver’s pre-eminent architecture firm. At the time, that firm was completing a transition from neoclassical architecture to European modernism endorsed by the two younger partners, Bob Berwick and Ned Pratt. Sai-Chew arrived just in time for the firm’s landmark commission to design first modernist high-rise in Western Canada: the 1957 B.C. Electric Building. Pratt consigned his star architect, Ron Thom, to lead the design of B.C. Electric, and Sai-Chew served as the job captain, working literally at Thom’s side during the two years from project conception to completion. With its then-groundbreaking 21-storey, 889-metre height and curtainwall façade, it required multiple teams of designers and engineers as well as a satellite office devoted exclusively to the project. The B.C. Electric garnered international acclaim for its design and engineering, its success made possible in part by Sai-Chew’s deft coordination of its numerous designers, administrators, and engineers. Working together on the B.C. Electric project helped forge a strong bond between Thom and Sai-Chew, who served as a quiet, competent, stalwart friend and colleague, often keeping things together on a project during bouts of Thom’s notoriously erratic behaviour. Like Thom, Sai-Chew appreciated Frank Lloyd Wright and made a pilgrimage to Taliesin West to experience first-hand Wright’s approach to the gradation of space and light. In 1960, Sai-Chew relocated with his wife to Montreal and became a staff architect for CBC, which was then in the process of building a series of local headquarters across the country. “CBC had tons of money, but no creative ambitions in terms of architecture,” he recalled. “But [the experience] wasn’t wasted for me. It was the opportunity to see Canada, of which I had no inkling.” Courtesy of the Sai-Chew family In 1965, when Ron Thom was grappling with the commission to design the Trent University masterplan and main campus, he pleaded with Sai-Chew to join his newly independent firm. Sai-Chew agreed, and he moved to Peterborough to oversee the huge multi-year project. He became a full-fledged partner in 1970. At the Thom Partnership, Sai-Chew played a key role in many of the firm’s most important projects, including the Prince Hotel and Metropolitan Toronto Zoo. He briefly moved back in Vancouver, from 1980-1982, during the firm’s temporary expansion into Vancouver. After Ron Thom’s death in 1986, he remained with the firm and its four surviving partners, who changed the name of the Thom Partnership to the Colborne Architectural Group. Although his tenure at The Thom Partnership was challenged by economic gyrations and Thom’s well-known struggle with alcohol, Sai-Chew never regretted his long tenure with the firm and its erratic leader. “There was a tendency to be completely dominated design-wise by Ron,” recalled Sai-Chew in a 2011 interview with this writer. “Having said that, I still feel that Ron had that ability to draw out the best in a person.” Dick Sai-Chew was predeceased by his wife Susan Sai-Chew (née Woo), and leaves his companion Sinikka Price, and his daughters Lydia and Trish. The post In Memoriam: Dick Sai-Chew, 1928-2025 appeared first on Canadian Architect.