Brigitte Shim

Architect at Shim-Sutcliffe Architects

Speaker

Brigitte Shim was born in Kingston Jamaica and calls Toronto her home. She studied architecture and environmental studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 1994, Shim and her partner A. Howard Sutcliffe founded Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in Toronto, Canada. Their design practice explores the integration and interrelated scales of architecture, landscape, furniture and fittings. Shim-Sutcliffe have realized built work in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia focusing on place-making. Shim-Sutcliffe are the designers of the recently completed Ace Hotel Toronto. They were the architects for the building and its interior public spaces. They worked closely with Atelier Ace to develop the approach to furnishings and designed specific furniture and lighting pieces throughout the hotel resulting in a new civic gathering space in Toronto.

To date, Shim and Sutcliffe have received sixteen Governor General’s Medals for Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) and an American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Honor Award along with many other professional accolades for their built work. Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe were the 2021 recipients of the Gold Medal for Architecture from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Professor Brigitte Shim is also faculty member at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. In Fall 2022, she was the Norman Foster Visiting Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and has been a visiting chair and lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), The Cooper Union’s Chanin School of Architecture, The University of Auckland, and others. She has served on numerous international, national and local design juries as an unwavering advocate for design excellence.