Moriyama & Teshima Web Site Information - History and Background:
by Norman Jennings

In the summer of 1994 the Internet hype was getting thicker. I tried reading a couple of books about the 'Net' but they seemed to contain more rhetoric than information. Then I picked up a copy of The Canadian Internet Handbook and it all started to make sense.

I had been on Compuserve for a few years, tried out America Online and been a member of different BBS's including ClubMac and Magic. It was time to get an Internet account and see what else was out there. I tried to find a service provider, but few seemed particularly interested in giving me any service. Eventually I got an account with HookUp Communications in Oakville at the end of August 1994.

I set up my PowerBook computer as instructed on the pages they sent me, connected via ppp, my connection was established and I was on the Internet. Now what? I still needed the software to actually do anything so I downloaded everything I needed from the Magic BBS.

I tried some ftp and read some newsgroups, but initially the Internet was not very exciting. It was the evening of Friday September 23, 1994 that I downloaded Mosaic not really knowing what it would do. Once it was running the Mosaic home page came up on my screen and I began to check out some of the links. That night I fried my brain as I came to understand what net surfing really was. Needless to say my weekend was shot after this. The October issue of Wired had just come out with an article on Mosaic in it with more sites to visit. Then I built my own home page. Crude, but it worked.

In October 1994 I gave seminars for the people at Moriyama & Teshima outlining how we could use the "web". Enthusiasm was high. It was time to get a corporate account for the office and to register our domain name mtarch.com. Anna Buchan, our director of promotion, attended a seminar on how to market on the Internet. I prepared a proposal of how our site would be structured and presented it to Raymond Moriyama and Ted Teshima in January 1995. They gave me the go-ahead to prepare a working prototype. I presented this prototype to them near the end of February and we decided to proceed with a full working site. Most of the testing was done using Netscape 1.0 and later 1.1.

Our service provider Hookup could not provide us with the web hosting we needed so I switched over to MagicNet who had us up and running in two days. Anna then helped supply me with project descriptions and images as I continued building the rest of the site. The formal launch was in April 1995 just before The Bata Shoe Museum opened to the public on May 6. We were the first architecture firm in Canada to have their own web site.

In November 1995 we revised the web site address to match our domain name www.mtarch.com.

Our web site was usually updated between project deadlines. In April 1998 a major update started as the graphic look, navigation paths and fonts were revised. Some Java was added in September 1998 that gave us a more dynamic site, including rollovers and animated GIF's. During the summer of 1999, the Project Gallery was totally revised as much more information was added.

In February 2001, the site was reorganized, and enhanced with new pull down menus and more animated images.

In April 2004, Moriyama & Teshima Planners launched their own web site www.mtplanners.com which provides information about the people, projects and design philosophy of the firm.

The Moriyama & Teshima Architects site was re-launched on December 16, 2004 in a similar format to the Moriyama & Teshima Planners site.

When the Wadi Hanifah won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010 Moriyama & Teshima Planners site was stocked with information that was part of a PR campaign organized by Brown & Cohen .

The new revamped Architects web site optimized for all devices launched on May 4, 2015. This site was then archived at legacy.mtarch.com.