Firm Profile

Friesen Tokar is an established consulting firm that provides full architectural, landscape and interior design services for a variety of project types throughout Canada, in the United States and overseas, with the Canadian Prairies as its primary market. Our firm holds Certificates of Practice in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Established in 1975, the firm has offices in Winnipeg and Calgary. Principals of the firm are Rudy P. Friesen, Brian W. Tokar, Jerald D. Peters, Rock G. Jerome, Joanne L. McFadden, Ken A. MacKinnon and John B. van Leeuwen.

Our firm's reputation is built upon a commitment to client participation, sustainable design (we were the first firm in Manitoba to officially adopt the 2030 Challenge), design excellence (we recently won the RCMP national design competition) and pro-active project management. We provide responsive service to our clients, operate within a strong team environment and use state of the art production technology and equipment. This is the foundation of our success as architects and why clients continue to request our services on an ongoing basis.

Management Structure of Firm
For each project we assemble the most appropriate Project Team, lead by our Project Leader who remains the prime day-to-day contact with the Client throughout the project. All members of our Project Team also answer to our Project Leader.

Our office structure is based on an open environment i.e. we have no private offices; junior staff sit next to principals; there is no office hierarchy; everyone has the same type of workstation. Workstations are grouped in clusters. When a new project begins, we relocate our team members for that project into the same cluster. This provides for optimum communication between all team members, resulting in a more successful project.

Our Winnipeg office has been designed to be LEED® Gold and is currently awaiting certification from the CaGBC. Its construction has been a major learning opportunity for us. We have transformed the office space into a working laboratory where we are able to explore and test design details and finishes in new ways prior to proposing them to our Clients. The openness of the office space, the natural light, the views, coupled with the extreme flexibility of workstations and technology has proven to be a tremendous environment for collaboration, great dialogue and creative design ideas.