Architecture columnist, author, and design writer
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For over twenty years, Dave LeBlanc has educated and entertained as “The Architourist” for Canada’s National Newspaper, The Globe & Mail. Covering new builds, sustainability, and the adaptive reuse of heritage buildings, Dave’s work reaches into hundreds of thousands of homes every week. Dave also enjoys aiming the spotlight at the oddballs that also make up a city: sidewalk stamps, old signage, the remains of space age Modernism, and other bits of architectural flotsam and jetsam.
He has spent the night in Frank Lloyd Wright homes and Frank Sinatra’s “Twin Palms” estate in Palm Springs.
In 2014 – 15 Dave hosted 20 episodes of Where Cool Came From for Canada’s iChannel (also aired on Discovery World in Mexico, Central America, and South America), and in 2017 he guested on the award-winning Great Canadian Homes with Tommy Smythe for HGTV Canada. Dave will be appearing on HGTV's Top of the Block in February 2026 and again later in the year. His first novel, Falconi’s Tractor, featuring an architecture-obsessed protagonist, was published by Guernica Editions in 2019, and his first non-fiction book, Hidden Toronto (and the GTA) will be released by Firefly Books in April 2026.
Dave also shares his passion for architecture as “Irma Girdle,” his drag persona.
1992 – 1995
York University, Toronto. English major, not completed.
1987 – 1988
Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. Radio/Television Arts, not completed.
1982 – 1987
Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts. Scarborough high school specializing in fine art and music.
