TYYZ and it's lighting divison Lumolar were founded in 2005 and are based in Toronto. We are a young international multidiciplinary firm that designs buildings, furniture and industrial products. The firm is a partnership of Catherine Hsueh Mei Lin and Mark Tholen. We have a strong philosophy in designing and making products in traditional ways with innovative and environmentally conscious materials to create products that are well built and of simple timeless design. We believe in products at any scale that have an esthetic appeal to be appreciated by generations to come and not to be discarded after a single use.

Our professional experience in the field of design spans from Asia and Europe to North America.
Catherine Lin (Taiwan) B. Arch, MRAIC and Mark Tholen (Germany) BEDS, M. Arch, AK NW, MRAIC, BCIN have practiced in the field of architecture, architectural teaching and industrial design; and prior to setting up our own offce have worked on and designed significant large and small scale award winning projects with Behnisch und Partner, Franklin D Israel, Richard Meier, Gottfried Bohm, IAA, Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden and Moriyama & Teshima. Catherine Lin who is an intern architect with the Ontario Association of Architects recently has won the industrial design "artifact" award of excellence 2008 from the OAA for our soft shell light series "baby fish tide". Mark Tholen was the design architect for the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, where the free democratic ideas of space creation in the Behnisch and Scharoun tradition were combined with the solidity of WW1 / WW2 cast in place "bunker" concrete. Inspriation for the solid parts and the lighting concepts of the museum were derived from the appropriate brutalism period in architecture. Neviges Church by Gottfried Bohm and Konzentrationslager Dachau Memorial by Helmut Striffler, 1967. The museum represents a collective feeling of wanting to sink into the ground due to shame and inherited guilt.

We get our inspiration from anything. May it be a subtle revolutionary building, sophisticated machines, the chapel designed for a farmer without charging a commission, nature or good art. There is good art and bad art but there is no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas - it is what you make out of it. Ultimately we get inspiration while salvaging a dashboard out of a car in a junkyard at the end of Truman Road in Kansas City.