Pina Petricone is a partner with Ralph Giannone in the office of Giannone Petricone Associates Architects, a multi-disciplinary office best known for projects such as Osteria Ciceri e Tria, Herman Miller Canada, UofT’s Centre for Ethics, PCL Seminar Room, Inn on College and re:TreetHouse – work that has garnered international recognition through numerous awards and publications.

Her work and research centres around ideas of tectonic representation that test the relationship between architecture and cultural difference. With the support of an Arcus Endowment Grant from UC at Berkeley, Pina is pursuing a speculative design project entitled Boundaries of Difference: The Toronto Party Wall Project which examines the enduring urban fabric of Toronto and traces the durability of its party wall as a designed object in old, renovated and new constructions across culturally specific neighbourhoods. This research has already become clearly distilled throughout her professional practice including the recently completed Il Fornello Restaurant in the Church Street (Gay Village) district of Toronto; and, the recently commissioned new Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.

Giannone Petricone Associates is engaging more and more in urban redevelopment projects at a variety of scales, including the Don Mills Redevelopment and the Portland Street Infill project. Projects which have fuelled search for sustainable models of redevelopment and material research that experiments with a kind of “tectonic urbanism” at every scale. In this vein, the City of Toronto’s pilot project for Chester Le Public School and Community Space, presents a new model for shared public amenity and has allowed indulgence in questions of material culture.

As an associate professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, Pina teaches design and critical theory at every level of the graduate architecture program, and has enjoyed acting as primary advisor for numerous award-winning thesis students whose proposals tend to question socio-aesthetic practices in architecture as urban constructions.

Pina Petricone received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1991 and in 1995, with a full fellowship award, received a Master of Architecture (II) from Princeton University.

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]