Profile in Innovation: This article is one in a series that will highlight new and innovative technologies as well as profiling people making a mark in support of the passive house community’s efforts to decarbonize buildings.
By Lia Grainger
Joe Ogilvie has always been what he describes as “an ideas person.” In fact, the accomplished project executive, instructor and business leader can trace his insatiable curiosity for how things work all the way back to his boyhood in Grenada.
“My family will tell you I was always tinkering and pulling stuff apart,” says Ogilvie with a laugh.
It’s an instinct that has served him well: from his early years as an ambitious young student growing up in the Caribbean, to the leader in sustainable construction and innovative building practices that he is today, Ogilvie’s journey has been shaped by a need to understand the “why” behind the work he does.
Ogilvie’s drive to improve the systems that surround him surfaced early: for a science fair project, Ogilvie and some fellow students designed a system of bypasses and tunnels to remedy the traffic congestion that was plaguing their community. The project won a national prize.
“We had no training, no classes in civil engineering or traffic studies, yet we were coming up with ways to solve everyday problems — and getting recognition,” says Ogilvie.
Ogilvie had always wanted to study abroad, so when Morehouse College in Atlanta offered him a scholarship, he jumped at the opportunity. The all-male, historically black school had alumni like Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Spike Lee.
“I said, ‘Hell yes, I’ll take that!’” Says Ogilvie.
Ogilvie’s rigorous education led to two summer internships at General Motors, where he gained firsthand experience in manufacturing. He also got some civil engineering experience, where he learned that fieldwork was perhaps not his forté.
“I did NOT like the exposure to the elements,” says Ogilvie. “I like being in a climate-controlled environment — and that’s mechanical engineering.”
As graduation neared, the allure of late-‘90s Silicon Valley called. Recruiters from Applied Materials, a company making semiconductor manufacturing equipment convinced him to fly to California for a final-round interview.
“It was amazing. It seemed like everyone was living so well, you could feel it — California was the place to be,” says Ogilvie.
As a total product support engineer, Ogilvie was responsible for getting the product installed and making sure it operated at peak efficiency, and he quickly became an expert in problem solving and systems optimization. But after seven years in the role, solving the same problems in the same machines day after day, Ogilvie realized the job was ultimately repetitive and uninspiring.
“My efforts and talents were being directed into a meaningless consumer product,” says Ogilvie. “It lacked impact.”
The financial crisis of 2008 presented an opportunity to step away and re-evaluate his path. For a while he considered going back to school to become an architect, but after careful consideration, thought better of it.
“I was having coffee chats and interviews with architects, learning about the practice, I never spoke to one who was happy or fulfilled,” says Ogilvie.
It was his Canadian fiancé (now his wife), who drew him to Canada. He was still living in California, and while visiting her in Toronto, she introduced Ogilvie to a friend in construction who could not stop talking about something called LEED. It was a new building certification that was all about sustainability and systems optimization. The more he heard, the more Ogilvie thought: “I know how to do that — I’ve been doing it for seven years.”
Ogilvie threw himself into studying LEED. He joined the local chapter of the Canadian Green Building Council and began volunteering for them, and he gave up the long distance relationship in favour of getting married and moving to Toronto.
“I was ready to get a move on with what I was going to do with my life,” says Ogilvie.
He obtained LEED accreditation, and six months of tireless volunteering and networking in Toronto’s sustainable development community led to Ogilvie’s first contract in the field: as the manager of sustainable construction for PCL, Canada’s oldest and largest builder.
At PCL, Ogilvie played a crucial role in transforming aging office buildings into modern, high-performance structures.
Ogilvie went to night school as he worked, studying commercial real estate so he could better understand the motivation of the developers he was convincing to retrofit.
“I wanted to understand the norms, the trends, the ‘why,’” says Ogilvie.
His efforts resulted in over $350 million worth of projects updating buildings across Toronto, including the TD Centre, Richmond Adelaide Centre, Scotiabank Plaza, and Eaton Centre.
It wasn’t long before Ogilvie’s niche expertise gained national attention. The American powerhouse Turner Construction had just moved into the Canadian market, and they approached Ogilvie to be their National Director for High-Performance Buildings in Canada.
At Turner, Ogilvie developed a holistic definition of the High Performance Building (HPB), one that encompasses sustainability, financial resilience, tenant desirability, and regulatory compliance.
By showing developers and building owners that he spoke their language and understood what guided their decisions, Ogilvie was able to position Turner as a partner, rather than just a service provider. With Ogilvie’s guidance, the company began to develop larger, ground-up projects, including a 300,000-square-foot Class A office building for EA Sports in Vancouver.
Things were going gangbusters at Turner, but as his fortieth birthday neared, Ogilvie knew it was time to take the leap he had long dreamed of and become his own boss.
“I had gotten enough validation over the years that my instincts were good,” says Ogilvie. “It was time to take a chance on myself.”
That chance was Archangel Ventures, Ogilvie’s own real estate and construction consultancy. The projects flowed in, but it wasn’t long before he realized the flaw in his plan: a consultancy based on the unusually comprehensive expertise of one individual – Ogilvie – is not exactly scaleable.
“I realized I need to build tools for the industry, to embed my skills into a product,” says Ogilvie.
Ogilvie recognized that housing affordability was a major problem, and that there were hundreds of midsized developers that often struggled to find investors for much-needed projects. His first major product was a funding platform that connects high-performance, mid-sized residential projects with institutional investors.
His most recent initiative tackles the problem of underutilized Class B and C office buildings post-pandemic. Ogilvie and his team devised a duplicatable solution, repurposing these structures by adding mass timber overbuilds, effectively converting them into mixed-use or fully residential spaces.
“We’ve sized the product to a generic class of office buildings so we can deploy the same typology over and over again,” says Ogilvie.
When he’s not at the office, Ogilvie has dipped more than a toe into the world of academia. He’s the Head of Innovation Partnerships and applied research at the Brookfield Centre Urban Lab at York University Schulich School of Business, where he’s also a lecturer in their master’s in real estate and infrastructure program. He’s also a lecturer in project management at University of Toronto and chair of Schulich’s new OMERS & Oxford Leadership Institute in Real Assets.
And while his proverbial dance card may be more than full, Ogilvie has a trick up his sleeve for whenever he needs to ground himself and find his north star.
“I just look for the ‘why,’” says Ogilvie. “It’s the ‘why’ that allows you to make the best decision possible.”
