43. Gregory Henriquez

Architect, Henriquez Partners

43-Gregory-Henriquez-IMG_4733Age: 52 | First AppearanceThere are architects in this town who design nothing but high-end towers. Others specialize in modest projects of social housing or low-cost rentals. There’s only one who does both.Gregory Henriquez is the mind behind the big-bang Telus Garden project that opened in September, with its giant archway and unusual glass boxes hovering over the downtown sidewalks. He’s helping to turn the three Hootsuite buildings off Main Street into an interlinked campus. He’s working with developer Ian Gillespie on the billion-dollar Oakridge shopping mall redevelopment—luxury stores! condos that look like terraced hillsides in China!—and, again with Gillespie, on the remake of the crumbling Stanley/New Fountain building in Gastown that operated for the last decade as a combination of shelter and transitional housing. It will become new, livable social housing, combined with stacks of market-rental units.Henriquez produced a book earlier this year, Citizen City, that examines how developers, architects, governments, and non-profits can work together to capture wealth from real estate to use for social good. That’s unabashedly his aim: to merge architecture and social justice in the effort to give people of all income levels a city they can call home.

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