Kendall Taylor of Root Architecture spent 20 years pioneering green building in Atlantic Canada before a Parks Canada RFP for an $11M mass-timber visitor centre put it all to the test. On the 10th anniversary of his firm, he sat down with Daniel Arsenault to explain why breadth beats specialization in a small market, what barn structures taught him about institutional design, and why he put his family ahead of a bigger career.
In the summer of 2019, a new visitor centre opened at Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish, PEI. Twelve thousand square feet of mass timber — glulam frames, nail-laminated timber roof panels, hip roofs and clerestory windows — built for Parks Canada on an $11 million budget. It won Kendall Taylor the 2019 Atlantic WoodWorks Architect of the Year award and a Canada Wood Council citation. It also capped a career arc that started in a carpentry family, ran through Dalhousie, and never once left Atlantic Canada on purpose.
Taylor is the principal of Root Architecture, a small Dartmouth-based firm he has run for a decade. His grandfather was a carpenter. His father made cabinets. He graduated from Dalhousie's architecture program at 23. He grew up knowing what a barn was supposed to look like — which, as it turned out, was exactly the preparation Green Gables required.
The barn as brief
The visitor centre commission came through a federal RFP. When Taylor read it, the connection was immediate. "i can get into this really easy you know it was very natural for me to be inspired by barn structures," he said. The PEI vernacular — barn forms, post-and-beam frames, agricultural scale — gave him a vocabulary the client already understood, and that ease of reference made the design conversation faster.
The building's logic started not with form but with movement. Taylor's team identified three visitor types before they drew a single line: people moving through quickly, people who want to linger, and people who want to climb. "we had to really think about how people move through the building — the streakers, the strollers, the stairs," he said. The final design phases the building as a barn extension growing into a 12,000 sq ft structure, with the three visitor flows woven through it.
The mass-timber choice was both environmental and structural. The roof panels are NLT — nail-laminated timber, which Taylor describes plainly: "nail laminated timbers is so simple it's just basically two by fours on their side nailed together." Crane-placed in large panels, no manufacturing mystery. The simplicity is the point. NLT gives Atlantic Canada projects a mass-timber option that doesn't require exotic supply chains.
Twenty years ahead of the market
Before Green Gables, Taylor was doing something harder: trying to build sustainable design credibility in a province that didn't yet have the infrastructure for it. In 2001, he became one of Atlantic Canada's first LEED-accredited architects, a credential he earned through work on a seawater cooling and photovoltaic project. Around the same time, he co-founded the Atlantic chapter of the Canada Green Building Council and later served four years on the national board of directors.
The work mattered. The adoption was slow, and not because Atlantic Canada lacked willing architects. The structural constraint was deeper: "we don't have a manufacturing base here like other parts of north america so a lot of challenges." Fragmented multi-level government, small project scale, no regional manufacturing ecosystem — these are the conditions that slow green building adoption, not lack of will. Taylor spent two decades pushing into those headwinds before the market started to move.
Halifax now has 25 construction cranes where there were none fifteen years ago. The window opened.
What a small market requires
Taylor is precise about what practicing architecture in Atlantic Canada actually demands. Asked what he specializes in, the answer is unambiguous: "absolutely nothing i don't specialize in anything intentionally because if you're not europe it's atlanta canada." Academic buildings, healthcare, commercial, cultural, airport infrastructure — the Halifax International Airport air traffic control tower, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie (with Diamond Schmitt Architects), Governor's Hall at NSCC. A practice in a small market is a generalist practice by necessity, not temperament. An architect who tries to specialize in Atlantic Canada without building cross-border volume will shrink their own addressable market to almost nothing.
The same logic shapes how Taylor thinks about his team. Root Architecture is a lean shop — two to five people is the target, and the criterion is cultural fit, not headcount. "i don't want it to grow just by numbers i want it to grow because the person is the right fit." In a labour-tight market, that means building a reputation worth joining before posting a listing.
The other thing a small firm can do that a large one generally cannot: run junior architects through every phase of a project — design, production, and construction administration — on the same file. The siloed model, where junior staff work only one phase in a functional lane, produces faster throughput and narrower practitioners. Taylor's view is that the full-project exposure is the education. "i just got to know the business so well during that period of time and it just gave me a real solid footing."
Firm but fair on site
The architect-contractor relationship in Atlantic Canada is, by Taylor's account, less adversarial than the industry's reputation suggests — partly because of how the region's small-world dynamics work, and partly because of how design-build procurement has changed the dynamic. "a lot of architects and contractors work in the design build world a lot and i think that helps the relationships be better." When the same parties collaborate before and during construction, they have less to fight about once the building starts going up.
Taylor's own posture on site comes from a phrase a contractor once used to describe him: "you're firm but you're fair — that's a very good compliment coming from the construction side." His upbringing helps. A grandfather who framed houses and a father who built cabinets gave him the floor-level vocabulary to talk with site supers and tradespeople without translating. He makes mistakes on every project — he'll tell you that plainly — and the question he asks each time is what the solution is, not whose fault it was.
His view on estimators follows the same logic: the best ones tend to have worked on site. "the best estimators are often the guys that had worked on the sites for years because they're able to just have that inherent intuition." Field intuition converts to faster, more accurate take-off on complex assemblies that don't reduce to a square-foot formula.
The decision to stay
In 2001, Taylor had an offer that would have taken him to North Carolina. He had a young family. He chose to stay in Atlantic Canada, and he has never characterized that choice as a sacrifice. "i put my career second my family first and that was never a difficult decision for me." The Monday vegan supper ritual with his two daughters, the relationships built over two decades in a small professional community — these are the returns on a decision that, measured against career trajectory alone, looks like a concession.
Measured against the full ledger, it looks like a strategy.
He describes himself as a late bloomer. At the ten-year mark of the firm, he is still interviewing for new commissions, still planning to relaunch the Root Architecture website, still thinking about what comes next. No plans to retire. The goal, he said, is to grow to the right size with the right people — not the biggest firm, but the one that does the work he wants to do, with people who actually want to be there.
About Root Architecture
Root Architecture is a Dartmouth, Nova Scotia architecture firm specializing in sustainable, mass-timber, and LEED-oriented design for cultural, institutional, healthcare, education, commercial, and residential projects across Atlantic Canada. The Green Gables Heritage Place Visitor Centre — opened August 29, 2019, LEED Gold target — is among their most recognized projects. Find them at rootarchitecture.ca.
Also featured: Lydon Lynch Architects, a Halifax-based sustainable architecture firm with a long portfolio of Atlantic Canada institutional, educational, and multi-residential buildings.
Guest: Kendall Taylor, Principal, Root Architecture Inc. Atlantic Construction Podcast, Episode 7. Watch the full episode. Awards source: Atlantic WoodWorks Wood Design Awards.