Marco Ianni, OAA. Principal

Marco Ianni is a registered architect with the OAA and the principal at m.i.a. LTD. Marco has been in the architecture profession since 2006 - first working with Avalon Home Builders while in his second year at the Azrieli school of Architecture and Urbanism, before working for Angelo Mattia Spadola. In the final months of completing his Master’s Thesis, Marco started working with Douglas Cardinal (DCA inc), a Gold medal architecture winner and the architect of works such as the Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, Canada - now the Museum of Canadian History), the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington D.C., US). This period of working with Douglas Cardinal proved to be his formative years both technically and conceptually. Working with and for primarily First Nations Communities, Marco was heralded into a worldview he did not know existed: a world of visions, ancestral stories, and a connection to the natural. Marco was pivotal in several completed projects namely Long Point First Nation School (Amo-Ososwan), Gordon Oaks Red Bear Student Centre, Carleton University’s Ojigkwanong Indigenous Student Centre, the Canadian Museum of History’s new History Hall, the pre-fabricated Cardinal House in Elsipogtog, and many more design concepts he assisted Mr. Cardinal with. 

He finally left in 2018 to work for Griffith-Rankin-Cook (GRC) until 2019, when he took a brief hiatus from practice and enrolled as a Ph.D. student in Architecture at his alma mater. Marco’s research focuses on inhabited bridges - a most unusual building typology that rose in the middle ages and fell during the Enlightenment; all the while working as a research CO-lead in the Carleton Immersive Media Studio Lab (CIMS) under Dr. Stephen Fai. His role in the lab was to research and implement a method of turning the existing repository of the campus’ buildings modeled in BIM into the Unreal Engine in order to create a fully immersible 3D copy of the Carleton campus, where students can log in and inhabit it as an avatar. Some successful virtual 3D tours were created with Marco’s help in order to provide an orientation of the school while lockdowns were occurring due to COVID. He began, at the same time, to teach at Algonquin College ACCE building as an instructor teaching design, Revit, construction methods, and visual communication.to future architectural technologists and technicians. 

Marco is married to his wife Alexandra and has three sons together: Valentino, Julian, and Roman. No happy family is complete without a canine familiar; thus they got their first dog Winston in 2012 and their second dog Santino in 2016. Marco is born to two Italian immigrants, Gino and Maria Ianni, and lived in Tor San Lorenzo (50km south of Rome) on and off until he was 9. He aspires to renovate his mother’s ancestral home in Ovindoli, Abruzzo: a town in the heart of the Apennines and his most magical childhood destination.