The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada mourns the passing of Mark Sterling, an award-winning architect, urban designer, and planner whose work helped shape the built form of Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area over a career spanning more than four decades.
Mark founded Acronym Urban Design and Planning in 2014, and continued to lead the firm — later Acronym Urban Design and Planning / Mark Sterling Consulting Inc. — until his retirement from active practice in 2022. Before that, he was a partner at Sweeny Sterling Finlayson & Co. Architects (2005–2014) and Sterling Finlayson Architects (1996–2005). Early in his career, he served as director of architecture and urban design for the former City of Toronto (1995–1996).
An adjunct faculty member at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design since 1987, Mark went on to serve as director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design program from 2014. Generations of students passed through his studios and thesis advising, and many now hold key roles at architecture and urban design firms across Canada.
Mark’s influence on city-building was felt at every scale. His urban design work touched Toronto’s waterfront, including the West Don Lands Public Realm Plan for Waterfront Toronto. He led the University of Toronto Mississauga Campus Plan, and served as overall lead of the multidisciplinary team behind Toronto Community Housing’s 100-acre Lawrence Heights Redevelopment Plan, one of the city’s most significant social housing renewal projects.
He was a longtime member and vice-chair of the City of Mississauga’s Urban Design Review Panel — one of its founding members — and a past member of the City of Ottawa’s Urban Design Review Panel. As an expert witness before the Ontario Municipal Board and its successor, the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal, Mark was widely respected for his ability to untangle the complex relationships between provincial and municipal planning policy, urban design guidelines, and the real, built experience of architectural space. He brought to that often-contentious work a rare combination of calm, clarity, and good judgment.
Mark was named a Fellow of the RAIC in 2014, in recognition of a career devoted to thoughtful, principled city-building and to the education of the next generation of architects and urban designers.