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Several years ago, a family member's account of the life and work of a designer of buildings — the very personal documentary film My Architect — was a surprise hit.

It's hard to say what was behind this rare case of architectural biography finding a wide audience. Was it the product of the film's gorgeous photography of Louis Kahn's primal creations in brick and concrete, Bangladesh's National Assembly buildings among them. Or was it the spicy details of writer-director Nathaniel Kahn's quest for the father he never knew (the film-maker was the issue of a long-time secret affair, the Philadelphia architect dying when he was young.) Most likely, interest in My Architect was sparked by melodrama and monuments both.

There are few spicy details in Finding A Good Fit: The Life and Work of Architect Rand Iredale. There are, however, an enormous range of other details in the 376 over-sized pages of this just-published book from Vancouver's Blue ImPrint Publishers — the wordiest volume ever produced on a Canadian architect. These details include a full page reproduction of the UBC graduate's 1962 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada membership parchment, a detailed chronology from online sources of every major building at Simon Fraser University (his firm was involved in 6 of the 38 listed), folios of snapshots of Gulf Island family vacations, and seemingly verbatim transcriptions of reminiscences from former employees.

This range of raw data is all the more surprising because by near universal agreement — Mr. Iredale himself included — Rand Iredale's main achievements were not as designer.

Mr. Iredale could not have been more different from Louis Kahn, who was a brilliant designer and architectural philosopher but a sloppy manager of money, employees, and his own private life.

Instead, Mr. Iredale, a Vancouver architect who died in 2000 at age 71, was a highly talented editor of other people's ideas, a debater of layouts and assumptions, and a tough but principled manager of the huge teams who produce complex buildings. He did the mental heavy lifting at his firm, Rhone and Iredale. The high design standards of their now-obliterated Sedgewick Undergraduate Library at the University of British Columbia, or their string of still-standing constructions around B.C.'s Bennett Dam would have been impossible without his hand on the tiller.

His partnership with Bill Rhone produced, in my opinion, two of the three finest modernist office towers in Vancouver. These are the former Crown Life Tower (Peter Cardew was project designer here and bafflingly, is not pictured in an otherwise over-illustrated book) and what was the Westcoast Transmission Tower but has since been re-named "The Qube" after conversion into condos.

Along with Arthur Erickson's stunning former MacMillan Bloedel tower, they stand on Georgia Street, artifacts of Vancouver's last stab at making downtown an enlightened place to work, not just live.

The Westcoast/Qube building is a success on many fronts at once. It is sensitive to urban design and the visual needs of pedestrians by lifting its run of office floors up off the site, clearing a view out to the harbour (a vista since blocked by new condo towers.) This goal is achieved by using cables to 'hang' the steel-framed floors off the concrete central elevator shaft core. This clear and public-minded building won numerous national and international design and engineering awards, and the book features consulting engineer Bogue Babicki graciously crediting its innovations to Mr. Iredale's team leadership.

In my view, Rand Iredale was a combination architecture critic and management guru, testing the squiggles on paper produced by others, perpetually seeking the right design and construction process.

This emphasis on process — on how a project evolves and gathers enrichment from initial conception right through to final construction — is also the reason Rhone and Iredale had no set style, but tried to produce every design from first principles, architectural modernism in a nutshell. Rigorous design from principles is always a difficult task, but all the more so in a period like our own that praises solely the architect-as-artist (Frank Gehry's eccentric sculptures-as-buildings) and interchangeable kit-of-parts designs (Daniel Libeskind's too-similar additions to Toronto's ROM and the Denver Art Museum.) Mr. Iredale's commitment to thought-out principles over facile style is the reason why his firm pioneered the field known as "design methods," was an early adopter of computer-aided drawing, and in no contradiction to either of these, the first Vancouver architectural practice to make a specialty of heritage conservation.

Finding A Good Fit is the product of the dedication of Rand Iredale's widow, Kathryn. She joins Jessie Binning, Mary Roaf, Janet Bingham and Doris Shadbolt in a line of smart Vancouver women who have dedicated themselves to understanding and preserving our city's visual culture. The book was assembled and prepared for publication by sociologist Sheila Martineau.

It is too bad Rand Iredale himself was not around to write, edit, and pick illustrations for his monograph. Judging by a lifetime of tightly-focused buildings and writings, his book would have run 160 pages at maximum, would have been illustrated by a sparing few but just right illustrations, and would have ended with an appendix outlining his own design process. Mr. Iredale, we all miss you.