Veronica Madonna

Background

About Veronica Madonna

Veronica Madonna is an award-winning Canadian Architect with 20 years of experience working with leading architectural firms. She is licensed with the Ontario Association of Architects and is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Before establishing Studio VMA, Veronica worked as a Principal for Moriyama & Teshima Architects, a leading architectural firm in Canada. She specializes in educational design and has completed projects for several leading Universities and Colleges in Canada, focusing on design excellence and sustainable innovation. She has worked on over five LEED building designs, including the LEED Platinum Lakehead University New Academic Building. She completed the Sheridan College HMC2 building in Mississauga, Ontario, a square foot academic building design to use less than 96 kWh/sm/year of energy. Veronica led the ground-breaking project The Arbour at George Brown College - a Tall Wood Building, designed to Net-Zero Emissions standards. Veronica was also the Principal-In-Charge of Design on the Honey Bee Research Centre, a mass timber, low carbon building dedicated to the education and research of honey bees' health and wellness. The award-winning design is inspired by the critical role that honey bees have in food production's overall stability on a mass agricultural scale and, as a result, includes an expansive pollinating and green roof scape that becomes part of the centre's learning experience. In conjunction with her professional practice, Veronica believes in the importance of educating our future leaders. She is an Assistant Professor at the RAIC Centre for Architecture at Athabasca University and a Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University. She researches and writes on holistic design approaches in sustainability, including mass timber advancements and ecological impacts in urban environments and equity in design practice and education. Veronica is a team leader and believes that a collaborative design process contributes to developing successful environments that enrich both the user experience and the surrounding community. She approaches every project with clear communication between the client and the design team to keep projects on-time and on-budget. Each project is carefully considered in terms of function, craftsmanship and materiality. The result is spaces sensitive to their surroundings and ultimately enjoyed by those who use them.