Toronto Star

They say architecture is an old man's game, and it's not hard to understand why. The stakes are so high, the amounts of money so large, that the big jobs generally go to the most experienced practitioners. For young architects like Valerie Gow and Philip Hastings, who started their office just three years ago, finding work is hard enough, but finding good, interesting, challenging, meaningful work is harder still. Regardless, the husband-and-wife team, 40 and 38 respectively, remains optimistic. Slowly but surely, they're getting closer to where they want to be. Just last month, Gow Hasting Architects (ghA) won a Design Exchange Award for its biggest project to date, the $1.6-million demonstration kitchen at Humber College. By some standards, that doesn't qualify as a major commission, but it's substantial enough to be done well.