Arcop

Arcop

Formerly	Affleck, Desbarats, Lebensold, Michaud & Sise (1955-1959) Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, Sise (1959-1970)
Company type	Private
Industry	Architecture
Founded	1955 (1955)
Founders	Ray Affleck Guy Desbarats Jean Michaud Fred Lebensold Hazen Sise
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Dimitri Dimakopoulos Arthur Boyd Nichol
Number of employees	150+ (1966)
Website	arcop.ca/

Arcop (also ARCOP) was an architectural firm based in Montreal, renowned for designing many major projects in Canada including Place Bonaventure, Place Ville-Marie and Maison Alcan. The firm was originally formed as a partnership under the name Affleck, Desbarats, Lebensold, Michaud & Sise between Ray Affleck, Guy Desbarats, Jean Michaud, Fred Lebensold and Hazen Sise, all graduates and/or professors at the McGill School of Architecture. In 1959, after the departure of Michaud and the addition of Dimitri Dimakopoulos, another McGill Architecture graduate, the firm was renamed Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold, Sise which it maintained for a decade afterward. The company did not adopt the name Arcop, which stands for "Architects in Co-Partnership", until 1970.

The concept of the firm was to pool together knowledge from multiple individual architects and was based upon the principles of The Architects' Collaborative, founded in 1945 by eight architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Walter Gropius. During the 1960s, Arcop was the largest architecture firm in Canada and at its peak in 1966, it employed over 150 people.^[1][2]

In 1970, Ray Affleck, Fred Lebensold and Arthur Boyd Nichol, an associate at the firm for over a decade, founded Arcop Associates, which continued to thrive for decades later until 2014, when the firm merged with five other architecture firms to form one national firm, Architecture49.^[3]