Claude Cormier (1960-2023)

CCxA founder Claude Cormier was the creative force behind some of Canada’s most beloved, joyous and critically acclaimed public spaces. A great lover of the city, art, and culture, Claude blazed his own trail with poetic, inspiring, and uplifting landscape work that challenged the modernist orthodoxy of public space while remaining practical and beloved by the public. He invited people to laugh, to come together, to see things differently.

His career began in the early 1990s with temporary installation projects that broke the conventions of landscape design in Canada by using the techniques of conceptual art, abstraction, and the bold use of colour. The scale of his work expanded to shape major public spaces in Cormier’s home town Montreal and his second adopted city, Toronto. His best-known projects include Toronto’s Berzcy Park, Sugar Beach, Love Park and the Well, and The Ring, 18 Shades of Gay, Dorchester Square and Place D’Youville in Montreal.

Through his career, Claude’s team garnered 100 awards, and the highest honours of the landscape profession, including recognition by the Canadian and American Societies of Landscape Architects, and American Institute of Architects, as well as individual and lifetime awards from the Association des architectes paysagistes du Québec and Architectural League of New York. Cormier was an Honorary Fellow of Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and a Knight of the Ordre National du Québec.

Claude Cormier studied History & Theory of Design at Harvard University, Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto, Agronomy at the University of Guelph. Serious Fun – The Landscapes of Claude Cormier by Marc Treib and Susan Herrington and published by Oro Editions in 2021, was the first book dedicated to the work of the practice. In 2024, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) produced an oral history on Claude’s life as part of its Pioneers Oral History series with significant landscape architects.