Tom Emodi founded TEAL Architects after leaving a 3,500-person firm, spent a decade building a tight ten-person Halifax practice, then in July 2020 packed the whole studio into a 12$24 storage unit. What happened next surprised him. This episode is about running a professional firm without a physical office, designing genuine quality into tight-budget housing, and why Atlantic Canada’s insurance industry — not the wood itself — is what’s stopping mass timber buildings past four storeys.
In the spring of 2020, Tom Emodi had a decision to make. COVID had emptied TEAL Architects’ downtown Halifax office in March; their lease was coming up in July. He could renew, pay the rent, and wait for normal to return. Or he could let it go entirely.
He let it go. Everything went into storage. Seven employees went home.
The outcome he expected — friction, declining team spirit, a loss of creative energy — is not what he got. “it's been the reverse interestingly… team spirit has become better which is something completely different than what I was expecting” is how he puts it. The firm saved tens of thousands of dollars a year. And productivity held.
That counterintuitive result is the spine of this conversation. But the episode doesn’t stop at the remote-work pivot. Emodi is a former Founding Dean of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning, a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and the Atlantic Architect of the Year 2016. When he talks about designing quality into low-budget housing, or about what actually prevents mass timber construction in Nova Scotia, he has the receipts.
The studio you don’t need
The virtual shift only worked because TEAL replaced the ambient information flow of a shared studio with deliberate structure. The anchor is a daily 9:30 a.m. all-hands call — every person, every morning. The format matters: “the first thing we ask is who's got a mission critical thing that has to be solved right this day”. Anyone with a hard blocker gets resolved first; everyone else can drop off after. No one sits through forty minutes of business that doesn’t touch their work.
Beyond the stand-up, per-project chat rooms keep threads from polluting each other, and breakout video rooms handle the collaborative mark-up work that used to happen at a shared drawing table.
The result Emodi hadn’t predicted: junior staff became more informed than they’d ever been in the studio. “everyone gets involved more than we had before… people know about our legal contract issues if there are any”. In a shared office, the principal handles the business layer and most staff never hear it. In the daily all-hands, that partition disappears.
The distinction he draws is between efficiency and effectiveness. A task-focused remote worker can be extremely efficient — output per hour goes up. But “you can be really efficient but you're not effective and effectiveness includes all those qualitative things about team building, team spirit”. Optimising for one at the cost of the other degrades the firm over time. The daily call is the instrument that keeps effectiveness alive when the physical space is gone.
The two things he actually misses: the physical display wall where large drawings get reviewed across the room, and the materials-sample library you can walk up to and touch. These are real losses. The plan going forward is a shared meeting-room-only space — hybrid, not full return.
Remote work lands differently for different people
Not every team member benefited equally, and Emodi is honest about it. For staff with family responsibilities or long commutes, the gains were substantial. One team member was able to restructure her whole day around her obligations: “she can manipulate her workouts around her training schedule… her efficiency has incredibly bettered now”.
For people who live alone and drew their social life from the studio, the calculus runs the other way. Work was community. Taking it home removes that. A firm principal making a permanent remote call should model the impact on each person individually, not just look at aggregate productivity.
The nail-laminated roof that saved three weeks
Before the virtual pivot, TEAL’s portfolio included a project that showed what local craft can accomplish with wood. The East Hants Aquatic Centre — a 28,800 sq ft public facility in Elmsdale, Nova Scotia — features a 1,500-square-metre nail-laminated timber (NLT) roof over the natatorium, built not in a factory but on site by local carpenters.
Nail-laminated panels require no adhesive. Carpenters built a jig and assembled the deck in place. “they built a jig… we saved somewhere in the realm of about three weeks we think in just getting the roof together”. Three weeks on a construction programme is not a footnote.
The project also surfaced the honest trade-off in modular prefab. TEAL worked on a CMHC-funded modular wood housing experiment that put the hybrid model to the test: 3D prefabricated modules for structure and time savings, competitive on-site trade bidding for finishing work. The goal was “we were trying to find that optimum line where we could save enough on time but also save enough on the competitive bidding”. There is no free lunch — factory-built modules buy schedule; they cost the open-market pricing you get when trades compete for the finishing work. The smart answer is the hybrid, not a commitment to either extreme.
What it costs to do housing well on a tight budget
The most detailed section of the episode is Emodi’s account of designing quality into modest-income residential buildings — the segment of the market where Atlantic Canada underinvests in design relative to Europe and Australia.
The principles are specific enough to apply directly.
Corridors. A developer’s instinct is to maximise rentable square footage by minimising hallway area. The architecture argument is the opposite: a window at the end of a corridor changes the feeling of the whole building. “part of your profitability is that everybody who comes through this door will want to rent an apartment — it doesn't feel closed in the hallways” The occupancy lift from a welcoming building offsets the square footage you gave up. Emodi describes winning this argument with a repeat developer client — eventually.
View lines. Every room, including bedrooms, should have a direct sight line to a window. “when you enter your bedroom you should be able to open that door and be online to a view outside — it makes every room feel bigger” This costs nothing in materials. It is a planning decision that happens on paper, before a single wall goes up.
Bedroom separation. In a two-bedroom unit, placing the bedrooms on opposite sides of the main living space — rather than grouped side by side — resolves acoustic conflict. “one where the bedrooms are separated by the main gathering room… if a couple has teenage children they can be on different sides” For the demographic that lives in modest-income housing, this isn’t a luxury feature. It’s a functional requirement.
The small moves: pocket and sliding doors reclaim floor area lost to door swings; dedicated storage is designed in rather than retrofitted; and every building, regardless of budget, gets one memorable design gesture — something a tenant can describe to a friend. That last principle is harder to quantify but it is the one that makes a building a place.
The real barrier to wood buildings in Nova Scotia isn’t wood
At four storeys, conventional light-frame wood construction hits a structural problem. “the bottom two stories have so much wood in them in order to support the other stories that you might as well be building in another material”. The material switches from economical to uneconomical at exactly the height where the Atlantic Canadian housing market most needs density.
The obvious answer is mass timber — cross-laminated or glulam systems engineered for mid-rise. The problem is not structural performance, and it is not Atlantic Canada’s climate. “the financial and the insurance industry do not fund or insure wood structures in the same way as they fund and ensure concrete and steel”. Independent industry data backs this up: elevated insurance rates for wood-frame mid-rise buildings — documented as 6 to 10 times higher than comparable concrete or steel structures in Canadian construction insurance markets — are the operating constraint, not the building code and not the weather.
Emodi’s view is that data will eventually shift insurer attitudes. The demonstrated performance of completed mass timber buildings will accumulate until the actuarial math changes. That is a ten-year argument, not a two-year one.
The firm Emodi is trying to build
TEAL runs eight to ten people by design. Emodi left a 3,500-person international firm after a merger because “the bigger the purchaser and the smaller the purchasee, the bigger the disconnect between the two cultures”. He knows what large-firm absorption does to the thing that made the smaller firm worth acquiring. He chose to build something that stays small on purpose.
The hire-and-grow philosophy follows from that. Find people who are good but haven’t reached their ceiling, then open every door. The stated goal is succession: “train them so they can own your company… that's the hope — we find this team that will basically end up owning the firm”. That is an unusual thing for a founder to say, and it is the line that tells you what kind of practice this is.
Guest: Tom Emodi, FRAIC, LEED AP, Founder and Principal, TEAL Architects+Planners. Atlantic Architect of the Year 2016. Former Founding Dean, Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture and Planning. Also featured: Bird Construction Inc. — general contractor on the East Hants Aquatic Centre NLT roof (documented on their project page). Episode 3 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Mass timber insurance barrier sourced from the Buildings Alliance Mass Timber Insurance Action Plan.