Tony Leong

Tony was a gifted designer, a devoted teacher, and a loyal friend to many in the architectural community in Calgary and across Canada.

A lifelong Calgarian, Tony earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Architecture degrees from the University of Calgary. After graduating from the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape in 1999, Tony worked as a designer in some of Calgary’s best architecture firms.

In 2009, Tony joined his former teacher, Marc Boutin, as a senior designer at the marc boutin architectural collaborative inc. (MBAC). He would go on to become an associate and a partner at the firm, a role he held until his death from cancer in 2024.

Tony helped establish MBAC’s culture of design excellence, and he contributed both directly and indirectly to many of the office’s most celebrated projects. Despite the responsibilities of his leadership role in the firm, he remained actively and intimately involved in design work. Architectural visualization was one of Tony’s greatest passions, combining architecture’s capacity for artistic and cultural expression with its capacity to look forward to a better, brighter future.

With Tony’s leadership, MBAC earned numerous accolades for its design acumen. In 2020, the office was recognized with the Architectural Firm Award by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada for its contributions to architectural design excellence, design education, and to the profession more broadly.

Tony’s most enduring architectural legacy, though, may be the countless students he mentored over the course of the many design studios he taught and the Master’s Degree Project candidates he advised at the University of Calgary. Tony’s love of design was both irrepressible and infectious. He challenged his students (and his colleagues) to never settle for the conventional, but instead to strive for the extraordinary.

To honour Tony’s contributions to architecture as both a practitioner and an educator, Tony’s colleagues and friends have established the Tony Leong Award for Design Excellence. The award will recognize a student who has completed the foundation year of the Master of Architecture program at the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture Planning and Landscape and whose work demonstrates both a commitment to design excellence and promise for future growth as an architect. Anyone who would like to support the endowment for the award can do so by visiting https://engage.ucalgary.ca/TonyLeong.