Barton Myers

Barton Myers III was born on 6 November 1934 in Norfolk, Virginia. He grew up tall, thin, and courtly in a Colonial house in the West Ghent neighbourhood. Next door lived Victoria (Vicki) George, four years younger; the two would marry in 1959.

The Myers family had deep roots in Norfolk. Ancestor Moses Myers, a merchant and military officer, settled there in the 1780s as the city's first permanent Jewish settler; the Federal-style Moses Myers House later became part of the Chrysler Museum of Art, and Barton Myers later served on an advisory committee for the museum. His grandfather, also named Barton Myers (1853 to 1927), was a former mayor of Norfolk and served on the board of the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. In 2007 the Chrysler Museum mounted an exhibition on that grandfather's contributions to the city.

That Norfolk inheritance of civic duty, urban fabric, and careful stewardship of older buildings would later surface in Myers's Canadian and Californian work.

Myers graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. His grandfather had been an admiral, and the academy's discipline and exposure to steel ships and hangars left a lasting mark on his architectural imagination.

He then served about five years as a jet fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, flying F-100s, first in the western United States and then for three years in the United Kingdom. Stationed in England, he took architecture courses at Oxford and Cambridge and discovered a vocation. After leaving the military he returned to the United States with Vicki, who studied music at the University of Pennsylvania while he earned a Master of Architecture there.

At Penn he studied in the orbit of Louis Kahn and the Philadelphia School tradition descending from Paul Philippe Cret. He worked in Kahn's office from 1964 to 1966, including work related to the National Assembly complex in Dhaka, then spent further time at the Philadelphia firm Bower and Fradley before emigrating to Canada.

In 1968 Myers moved to Toronto at the invitation of Penn classmate A.J. (Jack) Diamond to teach at the University of Toronto School of Architecture. Together they founded Diamond and Myers. Toronto was then contested ground: high-rise redevelopment, expressways, and reformers including Jane Jacobs, who also arrived in 1968. Diamond and Myers argued for what Myers later called a philosophy of urban consolidation.

Key early works included York Square in Yorkville (Victorian houses retained around a courtyard), Dundas-Sherbourne / Sherbourne Lanes (infill apartments behind preserved houses, Toronto's first major non-profit infill housing scheme), factory-produced DOFASCO steel houses in Hamilton, the Myers Residence at 19 Berryman Street (1971), and the Wolf House (1974), later given the RAIC Prix du XXe siecle. With Diamond he also shaped the University of Alberta Housing Union Building (HUB), a long climate-controlled galleria that became a cold-climate prototype, and the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton (1976), which won a Governor General's Medal.

The partnership with Diamond fractured in 1975. Myers founded Barton Myers Associates in Toronto; Vicki Myers became CFO and close collaborator. Associates Bruce Kuwabara, Thomas Payne, Marianne McKenna, and Shirley Blumberg later formed KPMB after Myers's California move. Canadian projects of this period include the Seagram Museum in Waterloo (Governor General's Medal), Unionville Library, Alcan offices in Toronto, Woodsworth College at the University of Toronto (with KPMB, Governor General's Medal 1992), and the Art Gallery of Ontario Stage III expansion (completed as the firm transitioned).

Myers began teaching at UCLA in 1980, opened a Westwood office in 1984, and relocated in 1987. He led or co-led major U.S. works including the Phoenix Municipal Government Center competition scheme, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts (an early large multi-form theatre), New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, Tempe Center for the Arts (with Architekton), and Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando (with HKS and Baker Barrios). He also pursued steel-house research across decades, including the House and Studio at Toro Canyon in Montecito, with roll-down metal doors and reflecting-pool roofs conceived partly as fire protection. Campus planning and design work ranged from UCLA Northwest Campus to universities in New Mexico, Alberta, Virginia, and beyond.

A Masters of Architecture monograph on his work appeared in 1994; he later published 3 Steel Houses (2006).

Myers married his Norfolk next-door neighbour Victoria (Vicki) George in 1959. Their marriage lasted sixty years until her death in 2019. Daughter Suzanne Lewis Myers recalled a low-drama household of travel, museums, books, classical music, and gardening, and remembered her father building her an orange acrylic bunk bed that filled a street-facing window of the Berryman Street house.

Vicki was not only a spouse but a business partner. From 1975 she ran Barton Myers Associates with him as chief financial officer. The couple hosted architects, writers, artists, and critics at their Toronto home; former associates recalled legendary Christmas parties and long maple lunch tables that defined the studio's right size.

In California they lived and worked at the Toro Canyon Road House near Santa Barbara, a steel-and-glass compound that combined dwelling and studio. After Vicki's death the Montecito property drew press attention when listed for sale. Myers spent later time near his daughter's household in Norfolk, Connecticut. He is survived by Suzanne; her husband, Adam Pincus; and grandchildren Henry Barton Pincus and Thea Minetree Pincus.

Myers's architecture fused several lineages: Louis Kahn's monumental modernism and search for form; Charles and Ray Eames's off-the-shelf industrial materials; and a witty, historically alert postmodernism associated with Venturi and Scott Brown. He insisted that success for a building lay in its ability to define streets, squares, forecourts, and courtyards, what he and others called the urban room and space positivity.

Urban consolidation was a career-long theme. Against demolition of neighbourhoods for towers, he argued for infill that raised density while preserving existing residential fabric, ideas crystallised with George Baird in Vacant Lottery (Design Quarterly, 1978). In a 2005 interview he said the goal had been to protect old neighbourhoods and keep people living downtown when cities across Canada and the United States were being left vacant.

He favoured exposed structure and mechanical systems, a lean "hair shirt" material palette that could turn tight budgets into spatial richness, and adaptive reuse that openly related new work to old rather than mimicking style. Steel houses, inspired partly by naval aircraft carriers and Case Study precedents, remained a lifelong laboratory.

Myers left built work on both sides of the border and a teaching lineage through Toronto, Waterloo, and especially UCLA's Steel House Studio. Former students and associates include leaders at KPMB and figures such as Peter Rutti, who called him an architect's architect and an eternal optimist and humanist who trained new graduates daily.

In Toronto, Bruce Kuwabara has said it is impossible to reflect on the city's architecture without thinking of Barton. Dundas-Sherbourne, York Square, the Wolf House, and Vacant Lottery reshaped Canadian urban discourse. In the United States his multi-form performing arts centres and fire-conscious Montecito house entered professional canons; Architectural Record and others covered the steel houses repeatedly.

The Art Gallery of Ontario Stage III work was later superseded by a Frank Gehry expansion, a disappointment colleagues said Myers felt keenly. Even so, his Canadian medals, RAIC Gold Medal, and Prix du XXe siecle for the Wolf House mark lasting peer recognition. KPMB and many others still cite his methods of plan, section, material honesty, and old-new juxtaposition as foundational.

Myers was a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the Ontario Association of Architects and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Major honours include the first Toronto Arts Award for Architecture (1986); Canadian Governor General's Medals for Architecture for the Citadel Theatre and Seagram Museum (1986) and for Woodsworth College (1992); the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal (1994); AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal (2002); California Preservation Foundation recognition for adaptive reuse work in Sacramento (2002); AIA Housing PIA Award for the Toro Canyon house (2002); RAIC Prix du XXe siecle for the Wolf House (2007); and AIA California's Maybeck Award (2014). Project awards also came from Canadian Architect, USITT, and AIA chapters for works including Phoenix Municipal Government Center, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Cerritos Center, NJPAC, and others.

Myers's work appeared in Architectural Record (including Record Houses and Record Interiors), Progressive Architecture, Design Quarterly, Canadian Architect, and numerous books. He co-authored Vacant Lottery with George Baird (1978) and wrote 3 Steel Houses (Images Publishing, 2006). A Masters of Architecture Series monograph, Barton Myers: Selected and Current Works (with Stephen Dobney, 1994), surveyed dozens of projects.

Television features ranged from CBC and CTV urban programmes in the 1970s to HGTV and A&E house features around 2000 and coverage of NJPAC's opening. Exhibitions of his drawings, models, and steel houses were held at UCLA, UCSB, the National Building Museum, the Chicago Athenaeum, and venues in Toronto, Vancouver, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and elsewhere. Oral and interview records include Getty Research Institute conversations on Bunker Hill and downtown Los Angeles and an AIA Santa Barbara podcast interview late in his career.

Barton Myers died of pneumonia at a hospital in Connecticut on 11 August 2026, aged 91, after a brief illness, near his daughter Suzanne's home. (Some Canadian notices gave 12 August; contemporary Globe and Mail and Wikipedia accounts use 11 August.) An obituary appeared in the Santa Barbara Independent on 17 August 2026; Architectural Record, Canadian Architect, KPMB, and The Globe and Mail published tributes in the following weeks. He was predeceased by his wife and partner Victoria George Myers in 2019 and is survived by his daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren.