Profile - VTLA Studio - Victoria Taylor

PROFILE

VTLA Studio is a landscape architectural design studio offering professional design, site planning and land advocacy services to private, commercial, institutional and public clients across south eastern Ontario. Working closely with our clients, we seek to reinterpret and add new meaning to our relationship to land and place through the design of built and living forms. The studio is based in Picton, Prince Edward County.

Our work is informed and inspired by site, ecology, hydrology, heritage, and horticultural possibilities. Engaging with land as a social, artistic and curatorial practice, we bring our client’s vision to life by integrating broad, conceptual thinking with detailed design, 3-D visual representations, and technical drawing; pushing beyond superficial, aesthetic gestures to offer layers of delight and beauty through the use of place-appropriate materials and forms that enhance life for all.

Consulting independently as part of a multi-disciplinary design team (architects, engineers, arborists, planners, and other consultants), VTLA’s work includes the design of private, public, institutional and commercial landscapes, site master planning, detailed planting plans, custom furniture, conceptual site-specific installations, and project management. VTLA’s high-quality installations benefit from a collaborative process and working relationships with architects, contractors, growers, lighting and irrigation consultants, artists, fabricators, masons and carpenters. The studio aims to explore green infrastructure opportunities, low impact development site strategies, and site and materials decisions that move toward a low carbon future. The team is trained in indigenous cultural competency.

The land on which we live and work–this place we call Prince Edward County, located in the Quinte Region Watershed–is the traditional and treaty territory of the Michi Saagiig (Mississauga Anishinaabeg) and Chippewa Nations, collectively known as the Williams Treaties First Nations. The Quinte Region Watershed continues to be the home of many Indigenous people, including the Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) nation of Tyendinaga on the north shore of the Bay of Quinte.

VTLA Studio is committed to learning the truth about the Canadian government’s treatment of the First Nations peoples, and to educating others about this truth. We are committed to cultivating respect, peace and right relations with the First Nations of Turtle Island and to incorporate and consider Indigenous voices, values and knowledge in the planning, design and management of the lands on which we practice. We are mindful of broken covenants and are committed to our role as a treaty partner. We support the 94 Calls to Action and continue to work with Indigenous and non Indigenous people to pursue a united path to reconciliation. VTLA strives to uphold the CSLA’s Reconciliation Pillars: Acknowledgement, Awareness + Action.

VTLA is a founding member of Design Climate Action, a group of allied designers who “acknowledge that as shapers of the built environment we have played a role in creating the global climate crisis. We commit to educate, advocate and design for a socially just transition to a carbon neutral economy. Change is needed urgently. Collective action must be sustained. Now is our moment to develop new modes of practice rooted in land-based climate solutions.”

VTLA is Principal, Victoria Taylor MES MLA OALA CSLA, Bailey Austin-Macmillan BEDS BA (Hons) PDC, and Amelia Hartin BFA MLA.

Victoria Taylor OALA, principal and founder of VTLA Studio, practices as an explorer, investigator, grower, builder, and experimenter; operating at the interface of built form and natural systems to make precise design moves. Combining artistic expression with functionality, public safety, green infrastructure and climate resiliency, and using the materials of the trade – plants, stone, steel, soil, wood, water, sound and light – her work dives deep to reveal new and hidden potentials to re-awaken and bring each site to life. A leader in the profession, Victoria explores design as a tool to bring new meaning to the outdoor spaces we share.

Since moving the studio from Toronto to Picton, Ontario in 2022, she has become a local advocate on land-related causes. She is a volunteer member of the Natural Cover Working Group, a citizen group to advise the Prince Edward Environmental Advisory Committee in their recommendations to Council regarding the conservation, preservation, stewardship and restoration of natural cover, which includes plant and wildlife habitat in Prince Edward County. In 2024 she launched Friends of Delhi Park, a local volunteer group committed to exploring, protecting and revitalizing Delhi Park, a 31-acre green space located in the heart of Picton, Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Victoria is co-founder / co-curator of ====\\DeRAIL Platform for Art + Architecture, a curatorial project, launched in 2016, working with artists and audiences to animate public spaces along linear landscapes. She is co-founder and inaugural curator of Grow Op, The Gladstone Hotel’s annual Urbanism, Landscape and Contemporary Art Exhibition in Toronto (2012-2019), is a sessional lecturer and critic at the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto and at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, is a feature writer for GROUND Quarterly.

Victoria holds a Master of Environmental Studies from York University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto.

Bailey Austin-Macmillan, senior landscape designer with VTLA Studio, is a landscape/architectural designer with a professional interest in public spaces and their relationship to the built environment, within socio-historical contexts. With training in architecture and a personal interest in native plants and permaculture, Bailey studies the connections between plant knowledge and design, through a process that is both critical and thoughtful in its relationship to the natural environment. Bailey finds participatory community development to be a powerful tool for decision-making and has used this in her work, research and volunteering within the non-profit sector, with a focus on food justice, food security and urban farming at the Common Roots Urban Farm and Spryfield Urban Farm in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is committed to cross-pollinating the worlds of academia and grass-roots development in a multidisciplinary fashion and has completed a Permaculture Design Certification from P3 Permaculture. Bailey holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies (BEDS) from Dalhousie’s School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Arts, Honours, in Sustainability, minoring in Development Studies, from Dalhousie’s College of Sustainability. Bailey is currently pursuing a Masters of Planning in Rural Planning and Development and she is a Board Member of the Prince Edward Learning Centre and Baxter Arts Centre in Prince Edward County.

Amelia Hartin OALA CSLA is a licensed landscape architect with VTLA Studio. Trained as a landscape researcher and artist, Amelia endeavours to design in concert with the natural processes that shape and animate a site. To her position, Amelia brings five years as a researcher for Professor Jane Wolff, recent recipient of the 2022 Margolese Design for Living Prize. This research focused on leveraging writing and drawing to help non-experts make sense of the landscapes they inhabit, with the goal of giving ordinary citizens a meaningful say in its future. Amelia’s foundational education in art and craft equips her with a capacity for lateral thinking and sensitivity to material. The delight of bringing work beyond the sketchbook has translated into an enduring interest in building, on-site exploration and collaboration with the tradespeople who bring drawings to life.

Amelia holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Interdisciplinary, from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. Amelia is a full member with Seal and Certificate in the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.