Bing Thom

Bing Wing Thom (Chinese: 譚秉榮) was born of December 8, 1940 in Hong Kong and emigrated to Vancouver with his family in 1949. His paternal grandfather had emigrated to Vancouver in the 1890s and his father was born in New Westminster before moving to Hong Kong after being unable to practice as a pharmacist in Canada.

In 1966, Thom received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of British Columbia (UBC) then a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. He spent two years teaching at the National University of Singapore, then returned to Vancouver and taught at UBC for another two years. In 1971, he moved to Tokyo to work for Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.

In 1973, his former teacher Arthur Erickson Architects asked him to act as project director on the Robson Square Courthouse Complex. Thom had a life-long interest in landscaping and embraced the challenge of the project, which involved putting a full landscape over a man-made structure and creating a 4-block roof garden; the project, which involved thousands of plants, was complex—he and landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander went so far as to create their own soil.

After Robson Square, Thom worked with Erickson on Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, the Air Defence Ministry Building in Jeddah and California Plaza in Los Angeles. He would also repeatedly work with Oberlander, notably on the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC. The site contained 50 100-foot trees and 200 60 year-old azaleas. Thom put the 8-storey structure into this forest, and then let the forest grow onto it. In a 1990 interview, Thom said that he was an architect first, but would never design a building without also designing the landscape, saying "The building must grow from the ground, and the landscaping is the foundation. Each building must sit correctly on that setting, while relating to the landscape. So the landscape is actually more important than the building. Many architects don't realize that landscaping is essential to architecture—that buildings and gardens are inter-related and indivisible. I start every design by looking at the property's characteristics—the way the sun shines, the wind blows, the location, the view. I use plants only, never anything artificial. And I always use vegetation from the building's locale. We must remember that we can't fight nature. We have to work with it."

In 1981, Thom established his own firm, Vancouver-based Bing Thom Architects in an office of his own design and construction. As of 2015, the firm had 47 staff members, including principals Michael Heeney, Venelin Kokalov and Shinobu Homma, directors, registered architects, architectural graduate and students, urban designers and planners, and support staff. Thom also had offices in Hong Kong and Washington D.C. and, in 2010, was awarded the Architectural Firm of the Year award by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC). At Thom's death, the firm's name was changed to Revery Architecture, which completed some of Thom's projects, notable the Butterfly Tower & First Baptist Church Complex which opened in 2026.

Thom's firm spent its first few years working on numerous private homes, condominium towers, and pavilions for Vancouver's Expo 86, including the top-rated Northwest Territories Pavilion, a $2.8 million iceberg, with a coating of shimmering glass granules. This led to the commission to design the Canada Pavilion at Expo '92 in Seville. For this, Thom needed to express the Canadian spirit in a way that would fit with Spanish architecture. Canada is the world's largest exporter of zinc, so Thom used thick zinc-tiled walls to control heat and included a cool, landscaped courtyard and a cascading water wall. Visitors waited in line for as long as eight hours to get into the pavilion, but they did so in a shaded colonnade. The structure also included a performance stage, exhibit hall, restaurant, art gallery and a 500-seat IMAX Theatre. It was one of the most popular pavilions at the fair, garnered major global recognition and became the only international pavilion permanently retained as a legacy building.

In 1995, Thom was made a Member of the Order of Canada and received the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal for outstanding service to his country. He was a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and received honorary degrees from UBC and Simon Fraser University—he was also named Honorary Professor by Singapore's Tongji University. In 2011 he was awarded the RAIC's highest honour, the RAIC Gold Medal.

Thom was married to Bonnie Koo, a landscaper, for over 50 years; they had no children. While on a trip to Hong Kong, Thom suffered a brain aneurysm and died on October 4, 2016 at the age of 75.