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“This was Tom Thomson,” he explained in one interview. “This was the rugged romantic. The houses are meant to be cottages in the woods. They’re not meant to be peacocks.”

Photo by Handout photo / OTTwp

Teron not only built homes, he offered land to technology companies for the price of servicing. Atomic Energy, Northern Electric and Mitel signed up. It was the nucleus of Silicon Valley North, and latecomers would have to pay more.

His influence went far beyond Ottawa. In 1987, he turned over derelict industrial lands in Toronto to the federal government at cost on the promise that the land would be turned into an urban park. The result was Harbourfront.

He was invited by former prime minister Lester Pearson to chair a building committee for a new school for international understanding and co-operation near Victoria, B.C. His company, Teron International, developed building block-type technology, and Teron travelled around the world. He even spent seven years living in an apartment overlooking the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was helping to renovate the museum.

“I would be working in the czar’s cathedral, his personal church that no one has seen,” he said in a 2005 interview. “It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done.”

Teron was an honorary fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, but he never formally studied architecture. Born on a homestead in Gardenton, Man., he and his family moved to Winnipeg when he was 10. He left school after Grade 10 and would later say that everything he built came from deprivation, not privilege.