WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

The issue of Indigenous housing is one of crisis where architecture and design can play a direct role. This project is one of several that came out of an initiative to model a process of community engagement, led by Indigenous architects, that would result in designs tailored to the needs of particular communities.

In the case of the Fort Severn site, the resulting design recognizes the family unit as flexible and fluid and offers the possibility of evolving with the changing needs of an intergenerational family. Additionally, it integrates the needs of a cultural way of life that includes frequent trips out onto the land and outdoor communal cooking. There is the promise that many of the materials for the buildings could be harvested locally. The project also hopes to generate an opportunity to create local prefabrication facilities whose production ramps up during the long winter, in preparation for the short summer building season. The success of the design is linked directly to a meaningful and community-specific engagement process. – Jury Comment

Approximately 25 percent of Indigenous Canadians live in overcrowded conditions and 20 percent live in homes requiring major repairs. The Assembly of First Nations estimates that by 2031, First Nations communities in Canada will need to build over 130,000 new housing units and renovate 20,000 more. The National Research Council of Canada’s Path to Healthy Homes program pairs Indigenous communities across Canada with design teams led by Indigenous architects, with the aim of producing a best practices manual for the design of affordable, resilient, culturally appropriate Indigenous housing.

As participants in this program, Two Row Architect and KPMB were paired with the West Main Cree community of Fort Severn First Nation, a member of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation and The Keewatinook Okimakanak (Northern Chiefs) Council. Located on Hudson Bay, and accessible only by air and ice road, Fort Severn is Ontario’s northernmost settlement.

Working closely with band leaders and community members, the architects developed a housing typology that addresses two key local objectives: enabling elders to live independently in the community for longer, while also providing units for young families, who often end up sharing overcrowded homes with parents and siblings due to a lack of alternatives.

The Resilient Duplex iterative housing system allows elders and young families to live as neighbours and support each other. A single-storey accessible elder’s apartment is attached to a two-bedroom unit with a flexible loft space. The two units share an entry porch, encouraging interaction between neighbours, and the elder’s apartment has a private terrace off the bedroom.

The design is flexible in two important ways. First, the larger unit’s loft space, when left open, can be used for storage, or as a playroom or home office. It can also be partially enclosed to create a main bedroom with ensuite bath, or fully enclosed as a private apartment. Units could be configured differently from the start, or adapted incrementally. Second, because it is possible to give every room in each unit a window using only the north and south facades, the two basic modules can generate configurations ranging from detached homes to large multi-unit dwellings. This includes arrangements in which multiple elders’ apartments are combined with one large unit, which provides communal space and a private apartment for a caregiver.

The team developed a site plan that arranges 12 units in two back-to-back clusters, each connected by a network of raised walkways, with open space between the clusters suitable for children’s play and community gatherings. To minimize water damage caused by frozen pipes, the walkways could do double duty as insulated utilidors.

Many other design aspects address the challenges of building in the remote north. Relying on locally fabricated larch shingle cladding helps mitigate material transportation issues. The stick-frame construction techniques required are familiar to crews working in the community, and passive house strategies upgrade envelope efficiency. Due to shifting caused by muskeg ground’s annual freezing and thawing—and, increasingly, by the climate change-related thawing of permafrost below the muskeg—foundations in Port Severn require constant repair. The duplexes’ hand-adjustable space frame foundation, which sits directly on gravel, provides built-in responsiveness to this literally unsettling condition.

CLIENT National Research Council of Canada / Fort Severn First Nation | ARCHITECT TEAM Two Row: Brian Porter (MRAIC); KPMB Architects: Shirley Blumberg (FRAIC), Bruno Weber, Laurence Holland, Rosa Newman | STRUCTURAL Blackwell | SUSTAINABILITY JMV Consulting | ENVELOPE RDH Building Science | AREA 140 M2 | STATUS Searching for construction funding

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

At a time where homelessness, along with the lack of affordable and transitional housing, is visibly present in communities throughout Canada, this proposal seeks solutions that can be rapidly implemented and seamlessly knitted into existing neighbourhoods. This project aims to destigmatize supportive housing and to give a sense of dignity to its residents. It includes communal spaces that are about trying to live and share together. The fact that it is modular will help with extending the construction season, making it affordable and filling demand, while also ensuring quality control and minimizing the disturbance of the construction for neighbours.

Depending on what individuals are going through as they get on their feet again, the building offers different levels of social engagement, by including program areas such as a lounge, a more social dining facility, and courtyards that engage the land. It’s a thoughtful plan on a number of levels, resulting in a dynamic environment with a village-like typology and a sense of supportive community.  –Jury Comment

In 2019, Ontario’s Durham Region committed to creating one thousand new affordable dwellings by 2024. Part of this initiative, Durham Modular Supportive Housing, will provide 47 transitional housing units for unhoused individuals, as well as on-site access to counsellors, nurses, and personal support workers, and facilitated access to a wider range of off-site services and training opportunities. Reflecting the pressing need for this type of accommodation, the team used modular construction to accelerate project delivery.

Situated in the 3,000-person town of Beaverton, Ontario, the project has a low-rise, pitched-roof massing inspired by the architecture of this agrarian region. Two linked volumes—one private, one public—comprise the building. The three-storey private volume contains the 47 studio apartments, along with lounges, washroom facilities, a laundry, and administrative service areas. The more public, two-storey volume houses the dining room, kitchen and servery, a reading room, meeting and administrative space, and support rooms. The public volume’s subdivision into one section with a single-sloped roof that rises on its northward trajectory from the dining room to the reading room and an adjacent section with a double-pitched roof makes this part of the building ‘read’ at a neighbourly, human scale. A recessed connective link between the private and public volumes serves as the main entrance lobby and opens onto a landscaped courtyard.

Prefabricated modular construction can be completed in less time than conventional on-site construction, while also offering high quality assurance and predictability. Tailored to the size of a standard flatbed, each 66-by-14-foot module for this project’s residential volume is kitted out with two studio apartments flanking a landing. When all modules have been craned into place and secured, work begins on utility connections, interior furnishings, and interior and exterior finishes. Site works, paving and landscaping are also carried out at this stage.

The development is designed to run on solar energy and electric power to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Three hundred solar photovoltaic panels integrated into the design of the roof will supply energy to the entirely electric heating and cooling system. Key contributors to operational energy efficiency are the airtightness of the prefabricated modules and a window-to-wall radio of only 15.1 percent. (Carefully considered window placement will nonetheless optimize views to the outside.)

The overarching goal of Durham Modular Supportive Housing is to assist vulnerable persons on a journey toward independence. The project strives for design excellence through basic means: human scale, a consistent language, pleasant landscape views. The warm, tactile and plain-spoken materials palette, which includes board-and-batten cedar siding, tongue-and-groove wood siding, and corrugated metal roofs, echoes the rural context. While modular construction can help speed the delivery of supportive housing to people who urgently need it, design that affirms residents’ dignity and value is a vital part of the infrastructure that can help them thrive.

CLIENT Region of Durham & NRB Modular Solutions | ARCHITECT TEAM Daniel Ling (MRAIC), Enda McDonagh, Kevin Hutchison, Zheng Li, Grace Chang, Mateusz Nowacki, Sonja Storey-Fleming, Kavitha Jayakrishnan, Megan Lowes, William Tink | DESIGN-BUILDER NRB | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Design Works | LANDSCAPE Baker Turner | AREA 3,463 M2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS 100% Construction Documentation | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION TBD

Projected Energy Use • POWER GENERATION 89,732 kWh/year | TOTAL ENERGY USE INTENSITY (TEUI) 132.49 kWh/m2/year | THERMAL ENERGY DEMAND INTENSITY (TEDI) 60.94 kWh/m2/year | GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INTENSITY (GHGI) 6.62 kg CO2e/m2

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

How do we bring biophilic design into towers? This 57-storey building essentially eliminates interior corridor space, instead including an outdoor breezeway that extends vertically to a very tall height. This brings natural ventilation and a communal connection to the outdoors through the core of the building, and introduces the possibility of cross-ventilation at higher elevations. It’s an innovative move that pushes the envelope of the tower typology. -Jury Comment

Old downtown churches and new luxury condominium towers may sound like strange bedfellows, but in this case, each has something to offer the other—and the community benefits as well. The Butterfly and First Baptist Church (FBC) development is the symbiotic union of a 1911 church on prime Vancouver real estate and a new 57-storey luxury residential tower.

An expanded podium level, landscaped areas, and galleria spaces are closely integrated with FBC’s heritage building. Along with seismic and code upgrades, the restoration of its sanctuary interior and the rehabilitation of other parts of the church, what FBC gets out of the partnership is a new multi-level space for a 37-space daycare facility; community support spaces offering counselling, meals, emergency care and shelter programs; and café, administrative, and multi-purpose community spaces, including a new gymnasium. Additionally, FBC will operate a new seven-storey affordable rental/social housing building that will be incorporated into the development, doubling its previous rental capacity; it will include rooftop community gardens, an outdoor kitchen, and landscaped playgrounds.

The architects state that the tower is named The Butterfly to reflect the spirit of transformation and to “celebrate the constant nature of change and the passage of time.” They add that the undulating forms of the façade’s insulated precast concrete panels are inspired by ephemeral clouds, while the fluted chamfers of the tower’s base carve out public realm space in shapes recalling the pipes of First Baptist Church’s historic organ.

Outdoor sky gardens on each level of The Butterfly provide semi-private space where neighbours on each floor can socialize and connect with nature, without leaving the building. In addition to promoting neighbourliness in a building typology that typically functions more like a series of silos than a hive, these sky gardens improve opportunities for natural cooling, ventilation, and daylighting. In comparison with conventional enclosed corridors, they can reduce overall energy demands while enhancing occupant comfort.

Inside the suites, spaces suitable for use as either second bedrooms or dens are enclosed with curtained, fully glazed partitions, offer­ing flexible use while optimizing views and natural light within.

The show-stopping shared amenity for The Butterfly’s residents is a two-lane, 50-metre-long pool that bridges the podium roof and the tower’s main amenity space. The structural ribs of the pool’s sculptural vault—made of modular prefabricated precast concrete—conceal mechanical and sprinkler services for air supply, condensation control, and fire protection.

All new construction is designed to meet LEED Gold standards and the project will include an on-site low-carbon district energy plant. The Butterfly and FBC aims to meet or exceed City of Vancouver requirements for building and energy performance, sustainable site design, access to nature, green mobility, water efficiency and stormwater management, zero waste planning, and affordable housing.

CLIENT Westbank Corp. and FBC (First Baptist Church) | ARCHITECT TEAM Bing Thom (deceased), Venelin Kokalov (MRAIC), Shinobu Homma (MRAIC), Amirali Javidan, Bibianka Fehr, Nicole Hu, Zhuoli Yang, Steven Schmidt, Culum Osborne, Lisa Potopsingh, Cody Loeffen, Kailey O’Farrell  | STRUCTURAL Glotman Simpson Consulting Engineers | MECHANICAL Integral Group Inc. | ELECTRICAL Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd. | LANDSCAPE Gauthier + Associates Landscape Architecture Inc. with SWA Group and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander | ENERGY MODElLING Integral Group Inc. | AREA 56,206 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Under construction | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION Winter 2023

PROJECTED ENERGY USE 45% energy use reduction (when compared to ASHRAE 90.1-2010) | 22% energy cost reduction (when compared to ASHRAE 90.1-2010) | 68% greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction (when compared to ASHRAE 90.1-2010) | Targeting LEED Gold certification for New Construction

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

This building has a clarity in plan despite its multifaceted occupancy of public-facing, university community-facing and faculty-specific activities. An atrium brings light and activity into the densely packed academic building. As a result, it does not feel crowded, but rather feels like a dignified, warm place that is well resolved at the human scale. Located at the entry to the university campus, it has an engaged ground level plan and lushly planted forecourts, as well as fluid circulation throughout. There’s a lot of thought put into its sustainability strategies and material choices, from its mass timber structure to its prefabricated wall panels and terracotta cladding. The quality of its materiality, rational planning and expression result in an endurance-oriented design befitting of a gateway. It is targeting an exceptional level of performance, with a GHGI of 1.4—a significant achievement, especially given that it includes a kinesiology department with a wet lab. -Jury Comment

At the principal point of entry to the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus, the Gateway project will create a place for learning, research, and community outreach through the co-location of the schools of Nursing, Kinesiology, Language Science and UBC health clinics.

Conversations with representatives of the Musqueam First Nation  were fundamental to co-creating a contemporary design vision aligned with traditional Musqueam values. The site strategy evokes the lost forest, long stewarded by the Musqueam, where the university now stands. The architecture, which makes extensive use of local wood in its hybrid wood-concrete-steel structural system and the cladding throughout the public spaces, reflects the project’s Pacific Northwest setting and the immediate campus context.

The site response began with a ‘re-wilding’—a recognition of the importance of landscape and open space to the Musqueam Host Nation and a desire to reconceptualize the site in its forest state. The design team mapped desire lines onto the site to understand how UBC’s campus community would want to move through this building en route to and from surrounding destinations, and used this information to determine the placement of public-facing program blocks within the ground floor. The main entry is from the south, where the two bar-shaped volumes flanking the atrium terminate at angles that frame the Gateway’s forest-evoking plaza upon arrival to campus.

A skylit atrium is the social heart of the building and its ground plane is a porous extension of the surrounding landscape. The use of wood and expressed timber structure reflects the Musqueam tradition of building and extends the ‘forest landscape’ experience into the interior. In keeping with the health and wellness focus of the schools co-locating in the Gateway, the wood feature stair that winds through all atrium levels encourages physical activity as well as social interaction between different disciplines.

Prefabrication will play an important role in expediting construction and creating open, flexible space that can accommodate future programming changes. Long-span composite timber floor panels will be pre-assembled off site and craned in, and the building envelope will be fully prefabricated off site as three-metre-wide panels that align and tie into the timber structural module at the building perimeter.

Gold certification through the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification program is targeted for this project. Due to a change in grade of 1.3 metres between the south and north sides of the building, a sloped surface is incorporated into the atrium’s ground floor to allow uninterrupted movement for all building occupants. Grading throughout the landscape and interior has been kept to minimal slopes and hardscape paving provides ease of use for people of all abilities. Sustainability objectives include Canada Green Building Council Zero Carbon Building certification, with a focus on reducing both operational and embodied carbon.

CLIENT University of British Columbia | ARCHITECT TEAM Perkins&Will—Jaime Castillo, Jana Foit, Laura Gilmore, Lucas Harle, Bojana Jerinic, Jessica Kim, Aaron Knorr, Steve Kwak, Elke Latreille, Manuela Londono, Sindhu Mahadevan, David Mikkelsen, Maria Montgomery, Ashley Perkins, Sumegha Shah, Alexa Wallert, Kathy Wardle. Schmidt Hammer Lassen—Fred Awty, Giancarlo Gastaldin, Kasper Heiberg Frandsen, Fanny Lenoble, Dorine Vos | STRUCTURAL RJC Engineers | MECHANICAL Stantec | ELECTRICAL Smith + Andersen | CODE GHL | LANDSCAPE HAPA Collaborative | AREA 24,716 m2 | BUDGET $125 M | STATUS Construction Documentation  | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2024

Projected Energy Use • TOTAL ENERGY USE INTENSITY (TEUI) 86.1 kWh/m2/year | THERMAL ENERGY DEMAND INTENSITY (TEDI) 15.6 kWh/m2/year | GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INTENSITY (GHGI) 1.43 kg CO2e/m2 | WATER USE INTENSITY (WUI) 0.04 m3/m2/year |

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

There’s a clarity to the architecture of this large-scale recreation centre. The building is structured around a linear street which unites a sequence of activity spaces, leading fluidly from one function to the other. The site planning offers a high degree of attention and planting; paired with the internalized street, these design decisions redefine the building’s suburban context. There’s a robust net zero strategy, which is especially challenging in a building with an aquatic centre that requires continuous energy use to heat the pools. The architects also described a convincing community engagement strategy. –Jury Comment

Although community centres are by their nature large consumers of energy and water, Western North York Community and Child Care Centre (WNYCC) aims to be a net zero energy building containing Canada’s first net zero energy aquatic facility. But wait, there’s more: this project’s urban design agenda is just as compelling as its sustainability targets. This ‘conduit for community’ is situated between two infrastructurally divided suburban neighbourhoods. The WNYCC links them together through the creation of a new linear urban park.

The community centre will comprise an aquatic hall, a gymnasium, fitness studios, community rooms, and a child care. South of the Humbermede neighbourhood and north of Pelmo-Humberlea, the facility has a narrow street address off Starview Lane to the south. A large printing plant that formerly occupied the site limited how the residential neighbourhood could be developed around it. Demolished a few decades ago, the plant bequeathed dead-end sidewalks and a faceless perimeter to the WNYCC.

The original footprint for the 7,250-square-metre program and zoning-mandated parking lot would have taken up the entire site. However, early site configuration analysis and traffic studies, combined with a discussion between the City and school board to share the neighbouring high school’s existing driveway and parking lot, freed up space for an outdoor multi-sport court and fitness area. Each major interior space opens onto a similarly proportioned outdoor room, with large sliding doors connecting them and allowing them to be used as one. Views through the building to the park reinforce the connectedness of the indoor facilities to the landscape.

Conventional energy modelling indicated that the most compact envelope, with program organized over three storeys, would be the most energy efficient—but instead the design team successfully made a case for a triple-bottom-line approach, arguing that the social benefits of high-quality outdoor public spaces and more permeable surfaces for storm-water management outweighed the penalty of energy loss.

This project is the first Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation facility mandated to meet the newest version of the Toronto Green Standard, which stipulates that 100 percent of the building’s energy use be offset by site-sourced renewable energy and that near-zero greenhouse gas emissions are achieved. A building envelope with a maximum air leakage rate 50 percent below the National Energy Code, waste water heat recovery, and an extensive site- and building-integrated photovoltaic system are but a few of the project’s interlinked sustainability strategies. Early site investigations revealed that a buried river valley and aquifer run under the site, with geothermal heat exchange capacity to handle the building’s peak heating and cooling loads, thereby reduc­ing the energy utilization index by 47 percent.

Feedback collected through an extensive community engagement process resulted in the inclusion of a community ‘living room’—a central gathering space and the main circulation route from which other spaces are accessed. Its program includes a community-organized snack counter, a gallery wall for display­ing work by a local amateur artist group, and a gaming garage that will focus on bringing people of different ages together through play.

CLIENT City of Toronto, Parks, Forestry & Recreation; City of Toronto, Children Services | ARCHITECT TEAM Partner-in-Charge / Design Partner: Ted Watson (FRAIC); Supporting Partners: Timothy Belanger, Tarisha Dolyniuk, Robert Allen (FRAIC), Viktors Jaunkalns (FRAIC), Andrew Filarski (FRAIC); Project Manager / Project Architect: Jeanne Ng; Design Team: Obinna Ogunedo, Janice Lee, Sean Solowski, Xueying Zhang, John Peterson (FRAIC), Francesca Joyce, Kelvin Kung, Dylan Jonston, Zaven Titizian; Landscape Architecture: Hyaeinn Lee, Sandra Cook; Public Engagement: Jennifer Galda, Melanie Taylor, Natalia Ultremari, Patrick Kniss, Amanda Chong, Lily Watson; Computational Analysis: Claudia Cozzitorto, Sarah Hassan; Child Care Design: Tania Bortolotto (FRAIC), Alex Horber, Elaine Welsher | Child Care Architecture and Design Bortolotto Design Ltd. | LANDSCAPE MJMA Landscape Architecture | STRUCTURAL Blackwell | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Smith+Andersen | SUSTAINABILITY Footprint | CIVIL EMC Group | GEOTECHNICAL Beatty Geothermal Consulting | TRIPLE-BOTTOM-LINE COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS Autocase | AREA 7,460 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Contract Documents | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2026

THERMAL ENERGY DEMAND INTENSITY (TEDI) 112 kWh/m2/year | GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INTENSITY (GHGI) 0 kg CO2e/m2 | TOTAL ENERGY USE INTENSITY (TEUI) 0 kWh/m2/year 

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This building includes an open shared workspace downstairs, and a residential space upstairs, combined with an urban agriculture component. The jury found the design to be well executed, and was excited to see an architecture firm taking the initiative to experiment with this mix of programs on an urban infill site in Halifax. This architect could not find a willing developer to explore an infill solution using mass timber, so became their own client. The urban agriculture is important to consider for its sustainability features but also as an inclusivity measure. These gardens can contribute positively to issues of food security and provide a means to grow uncommon produce that is specific to immigrant and newly arrived communities. –Jury Comment

Covid-19 has radically changed work culture. Many architects will return to design studios and some will continue to work from home, but most people desire the flexibility of both worlds. The collaboration, socialization, and serendipity of a group environment, as well as the concentration enabled by solo work, are all vital to creativity—a balance that has been difficult to achieve during the past year.

Halifax architecture firm FBM is taking these lessons to heart in the design of its new studio. Its post-pandemic office is shaped by multiple breakout spaces, private rooms for Zoom calls, and gathering spots both indoors and outdoors. Fresh air, daylight, and access to nature are central to the design.

The project, named Live/Work/Grow, contains office space, residential units, a courtyard, and a roof garden. It is constructed on a brownfield site in the North End of Halifax, close to the city’s Commons. The architecture aims to embody the values of the studio, as a place for “people-driven design.”

Social, economic, and ecological sustainability are important to the studio’s values. Wanting to study mass timber construction, but unable to pursue it with client-based work, FBM made its office design a research project, allowing the firm to explore glulam and nail-laminated timber floor assemblies within a five-storey wood structure. Such assemblies have been used for more than a century, particularly in large-span warehouses where solid, sturdy floors were required.

Beyond reducing the building’s embodied carbon, studies have shown that wood buildings increase occupant attention and productivity, while reducing stress levels and fatigue. Wood is a lighter material than steel, allowing for a simpler foundation. The use of mass timber also facilitates a shorter construction schedule, smaller laydown area, and reduced construction noise and debris. Finally, because wood is a natural material that feels warm and soft to the touch, it creates a space that helps to reconnect people with nature.

The studio’s neighbour to the west is the Souls Harbour Rescue Mission, an organization that provides services for those facing hunger, homelessness, poverty, abuse, and addiction. The mission serves nutritious lunches every weekday to local families and seniors from affordable housing blocks in the area. The studio strives to be a community ally by growing food on its roof for, and in partnership with, its neighbours. A community art project completed with local daycares adorns the construction hoarding wall facing the street. A permanent art project will be developed with the community on the wall facing the adjacent building—Souls Harbour Rescue Mission.

Both standing out and fitting in, this building’s design is a study of the lived relationships between form, function, and the everyday rhythms of the neighbourhood. In its attention to the specificities of its context, as well as in its use of mass timber, it aims to serve as an example of the possibilities for future projects in Atlantic Canada.

CLIENT FBM Architecture – Interior Design – Planning | ARCHITECT TEAM Susan Fitzgerald (FRAIC), Alicia McDowell (MRAIC), Danny Goodz, Ben Griffiths, Peter Kolodziej, Amber Kilborn (MRAIC), Rita Wang, Stavros Kondeas | CIVIL Servant Dunbrack McKenzie & MacDonald Ltd. | STRUCTURAL Campbell Comeau Engineering | MECHANICAL CBCL Limited | ELECTRICAL CBCL Limited | GEOTECHNICAL & ENVIRONMENTAL Stantec | CONTRACTOR Aitchison Fitzgerald Builders | AREA 1,706 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Under Construction | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION Fall 2022

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

There are grocery and big-box stores across Canada. Many that are centrally located are emptying out as delivery options become more popular, and retailers take advantage of opportunities to warehouse on more affordable land. To take a building that occupies a prime location at the centre of a community and repurpose it for an essential community institution is an innovative approach. In this project, the resulting design is whimsical and intelligent at the same time. The scale of the building is broken up by creating house-like elements that present an interesting environment for children and respond to the surrounding residential buildings; the project also enlivens the site around it, replacing the parking lots with sports fields and play areas. -Jury Comment

Located at the centre of a resource-poor neighbourhood in Laval, a city north of Montreal, École Val-Martin transforms an abandoned big-box grocery store into a playful centre of learning for primary school children.

This project takes a stance on the ever-relevant issue of suburban sprawl by proposing an alternate to new construction. It tackles several important questions: How can architects and their clients actively participate in remodelling the existing urban fabric, instead of contributing to the growing ecological footprint of the suburbs? Can we recycle and adapt existing structures to imagine progressive schools for young children? How could this impact the education system in Quebec and beyond?

The project is inspired by Schola, a Quebec research initiative that aims to give a second life to existing schools. This project, too, proposes to give a second life to an existing structure—but in a novel way.

The first main design question was how to bring light to the centre of a building with a large, square footprint. A courtyard was introduced to bring light to key spaces including the library, as well as to create a tranquil outdoor space in the middle of the building. An addition to the main façade of the former grocery store creates two new wings of classrooms, forming a U-shape that benefits from ample sunlight.

Next, the architects tackled the challenge of working within an existing grid that was entirely irregular. To solve this, an irregular-sized gym was placed within the largest bay. This gym, along with accompanying changerooms, storage, and mechanical areas, becomes the nucleus of the project. Circulation unfolds around the gym and the library courtyard, creating a double ring of corridors. The resulting flow is functional and efficient, and the circulation divides the school into zones accessed by groups of children at different times of the day.

The existing building’s tall ceilings—just shy of two storeys—became an opportunity to bring a playful identity to the primary school. The design introduces house-like forms in the multi-purpose room, library, and kindergarten classrooms. In these spaces, peaked ceilings extend from the interior to the exterior façade, their geometry derived from the existing grid structure. On the exterior, varying façade depths and textures are used to accentuate the triangular forms, hinting at the existing building in an otherwise seamless transition from old to new.

A new model of adaptive reuse is necessary for the future health of our cities and society. The design for École Val-Martin suggests how adaptive reuse can also represent an investment in progressive education for our children.

CLIENT Centre de services scolaire de Laval | ARCHITECT TEAM Stephan Chevalier (MIRAC), Sergio Morales (MIRAC), Trevor Davies, Katrine Rivard, Vanessa Giroux, Patrizia Bayer, Camille Lefebvre, Robin Vergobbio | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Stantec | STRUCTURAL GBI | LANDSCAPE BMA | AREA 5,870 m2 | BUDGET $18 M | STATUS Design development | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2024

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This project begins with a vernacular reference to Prairie silos, and transforms it into something that is quite lovely in spatial terms. For a commercial development, the jury found it to be both playful and to add rhythm to the street. Because of its modularity, they imagined how a building like this could transform uses over time—if a large tenant pulled out, their space could be adaptively reused into a series of smaller shops. Overall, this is quite an innovative prefabricated design with a lot of potential. – Jury Comment

Traditionally, architecture is thought of as a monumental art, creating buildings that last unchanged for decades or longer. But in reality, many of the places where we live, work and play come and go. We’re constantly remodelling, renovating and replacing buildings as styles and needs change.

To act sustainably in the face of these complexities, the architects at Calgary-based Modern Office of Design + Architecture have been increasingly interested in the idea of circular design. This points to a cradle-to-cradle approach to construction, designing buildings that can be disassembled at the end of their use, and repurposed into new buildings.

A circular design approach was a perfect fit for FARM. Modern Office’s client for the project is a developer who asked for a 1,100-square-metre building to temporarily occupy a downtown Edmonton site. In response, Modern Office designed a structure that could be used temporarily, then dismantled into its component parts and upcycled.

The design is inspired by the Quonset hut, a prefabricated structure roofed with a curved sheet of corrugated galvanized steel that was first manufactured in the 1940s for the United States Navy. The lightweight buildings became used for many non-military purposes, including as outbuildings in the Canadian prairies. Its semicircular form has resonances with other vernacular agricultural buildings, including metal storage sheds, cylindrical silos, and dome-roofed greenhouses.

For FARM, Modern Office ganged several Quonset huts together, creating a spatially flexible arrangement that allows a tenant to occupy one, several, or all of the bays. The modular approach allows for the forms to pull apart, creating secret gardens and courtyards that introduce daylight deep into the interiors of the barrel-vaulted forms.

In order for the building to be upcycled, every major component is designed to be removable for reuse. This includes a screw-pile foundation system, a modular, structural steel rib envelope, insulative “pillows” that are mechanically fastened back to the structure, panelized interior finishing, interior concrete block walls that are mortared together using dissolvable, cementitious grout, and modular glazing units. Ninety percent of the components used in the building will be indexed using QR codes, producing a database kit of parts. This will aid in the future re-assembly of the building as a whole structure—or the repurposing of its parts into new structures.

CLIENT LPY Developments Inc. (Hon Leong ) | ARCHITECT TEAM Dustin Couzens (MRAIC), Ben Klumper (MRAIC), Nicholas Tam (MRAIC) | CONTRACTOR CREATE Construction Management  | QUONSET HUT SUPPLIER Rocket Steel Canada | STRUCTURAL Wolsey Engineering | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Arrow Engineering | CIVIL Epcor Engineering | AREA 1155m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Design Development  | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION Spring 2023

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This house has a sculptural expression that is fascinating. While the intricate brick and barrel vaults would make for an expensive build, there is a lot of design effort that has gone into this interesting interlocking of multiple units on a narrow Toronto infill site. More projects are needed that fill the “missing middle” and bring increased density to downtown neighbourhoods in the city; this project takes an architecturally ambitious approach to tackling that issue. –Jury Comment

Older, low-rise urban neighbourhoods are under tremendous pressure to increase their density. A common mid-20th-century answer to this chronically recurring supply-and-demand problem was to plunk down new mid-rise or high-rise multi-unit buildings wherever a sufficient quantity of small, older lots could be bought up, without much regard for what this rough patchwork did to the urban fabric. Since then, zoning has become more attuned to context, and ‘gentle densification’ has become a hot topic.

This project argues that there is more to successful gentle densification getting the grain and height right: it also hinges on a willingness to embrace new typologies, along with styles that cannot be classified as either ‘modern’ or ‘heritage’. Ja Architecture describes Toronto’s Markham Street as a thoroughfare “where anomalies are the norm.” Adding to the street’s already-heterogenous mix of low-rise housing types, Ja proposes replacing an end unit in a series of old rowhouses with a new multi-unit housing development that capitalizes on one of Markham Street’s anomalies: a narrow public laneway running the length of the site.

Five interlocking units of varying type are carved into the four-level main volume. With services nested along the party wall and the entries along the easement, a scissor stair negotiates between the two, sometimes channelling people upwards, sometimes pulling light into the building. At the rear of the site is one additional unit: a vaulted, two-storey laneway live/work suite.

Clad in brick veneer, the main building is connected by its material and form to a laneway suite accessed from the rear yard. The continuity of the two volumes is reinforced along the public thoroughfare through double wythe brick garden walls. While the wall provides a spatial separation between public and private, openings in the wall mark access to each of the units along the pathway.

The main building leverages the efficiency of the scissor stair to fit two studio units and three two-storey units within a volume that has only three fully above-grade storeys. Spaces within each unit are not stacked in a typical fashion. Instead, the scissor stair provides a dedicated circulation system within each of the main building’s two-storey units, connecting the sleeping spaces on the lower level to the living space above. Deep walkouts with full-height glazing connect the main building’s lower-level units to the ground.

Projects ranging from a 16th-century barrel vault in Venice’s Arsenale to the walk-up entries to the units in Alvaro Siza’s SAAL Bouça social housing complex in Porto, Portugal, influenced Ja Architecture’s approach to the Markham project. In a neighbourhood of pitched roofs, this project’s vaulted roofs are at first glance yet another Markham Street anomaly. But this is at the same time a contextual densification, harmonious in scale and material with its surroundings, and even echoing the arched dormers of the adjoining old row houses. This project’s ingenious interlocking volumes are pieces that could help solve the gentle densification puzzle.

CLIENT Houyan Homes | ARCHITECT TEAM Nima Javidi, Behnaz Assadi, Liam Thornewell, Kyle O’Brien | STRUCTURAL Moses Structural Engineering | PLANNING Sean Galbraith & Associates | MEP SustainGlobe | LANDSCAPE Behnaz Assadi (Ja Studio) | AREA 330 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Design Development | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2024

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This is a beautiful project in its integration of building form with landscape. The round forms nest in the landscape in a compelling way and speak to the need to value and conserve our natural environments. The jury applauded the efforts towards the protection and rehabilitation of panda populations, and the project’s elevation of the importance of nature in Asian culture. – Jury Comment

Projects that aim to preserve endangered wildlife often involve providing public access to animals in captivity. Not all that long ago, people considered it acceptable to confine beasts in small cages and stare at them from all sides. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Today the challenge is to provide the animals with as natural, generously sized, and undisturbed an environment as possible, while still allowing humans to get close enough to be captivated by the captives, for that is how we become stakeholders in the survival of a species. The new Panda Pavilions designed for China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding (also known as Panda Base) meet this delicate balancing act with insight, ingenuity, and no small amount of poetry.

Located in Sichuan Province in a national forest park about 10 km from downtown Chengdu, Panda Base was established in the 1980s by a handful of researcher/preservationists with six rescued giant pandas. Without capturing a single giant panda from the wild, the Base has increased its captive population of the species to well over 200. The centre combines scientific research and panda breeding with public education and environmental tourism, and is a Global 500 of the United Nations Environment Programme destination.

A convergence of architecture, landscape, and land art, the four ring-shaped pavilions nestle into park’s woodland slopes, enclosing terraced outdoor space for pandas. Connecting pathways and bermed viewing galleries provide visitors with varied vantage points for observing pandas at relatively close range, but always with physical boundaries separating panda space and human space. Rising above the topography in places and sinking into it in others, the pavilions’ rings house panda indoor activity spaces and living quarters, along with staff administrative areas and support spaces such as rooms for preserving and storing the bamboo shoots that are central to the panda diet.

For the visitors, the project is designed to create an immersive experience of exploration and discovery. As people move through the site, they can enjoy the interaction between the stunning scenery and the gentle dynamism of the pavilions’ looping, cedar-clad forms. Water nozzles producing a fine mist for panda-friendly temperature and humidity will doubtless add to the impression of being in a dreamlike place.

CLIENT Chengdu Tianfu Greenway Construction Investment Co., Ltd. / Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding | ARCHITECT TEAM Ping Jiang, Michelle Bao, Sean Lu, Yunpeng Ma, Shuang Zhang, Chendi He, Di Fan, Xiaoxu Sun | COLLABORATING LOCAL DESIGN INSTITUTE Chengdu Architectural Design & Research Institute | AREA 13,398 M2 | BUDGET $6.5 M (USD) | STATUS Under Construction | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION December 2021

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This is a sensitive addition to a storied Toronto building on the University of Toronto campus. It’s an elegant building rendered with a deft architectural hand, that is working with an iconic piece of Toronto architecture in a lovely way. -Jury Comment

With their historical pedigree and romantic charm, inward-facing, quadrangle-enclosing buildings have been the default setting for collegiate architecture for centuries. At Woodsworth College, an internal arcade surrounding the quadrangle is a key place for encounter and engagement within the academic community.

The New Academic Building at Woodsworth College posits that the 21st-century pedagogical shift toward outreach and engagement requires educational environments that are more permeable to their surroundings. This ‘contemporary cloister’ for one of the seven colleges comprising the University of Toronto’s urban St. George campus takes the success of its existing context as a precedent, serving up the arcade as a vertical organizing element. The result is an academic and social hub that provides an environment conducive to sustained concentration, while connecting scholars to the world beyond its walls.

Woodsworth College is home to both the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources (CIRHR) and the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies (CRIM). Its existing, interconnected buildings include the 1892 Alexander McArthur House and the acclaimed 1992 Woodsworth College addition by Barton Myers Associates and KPMB; both are on the City of Toronto’s Heritage Register. Another part of the college, Kruger Hall (also known as the Drill Hall) will be demolished to make way for this 3,767-square-metre project, which will more than double the current space for the CIRHR and CRIM programs and consolidate them under one roof. The outdoor Peter. F. Bronfman Courtyard—created by the 1992 addition—will be preserved, with setbacks incorporated into the new building to minimize its cast shadows.

Program areas include a triple-height learning commons and other student and event spaces, offices and hoteling stations, six new classrooms, food services, and a library. Spaces are defined by circulation and interconnected horizontally and vertically to facilitate encounter and engagement.

A driving concept shaping The New Academic Building at Woodsworth College is the continuation and reimagining of the traditional cloister formation provided by the 1992 wing. Extending and ‘pulling’ the cloister vertically through the new building organizes the spaces within, creating a multi-level arcade with ‘courtyards’ for interacting, studying, and collaborating. Circulation is exposed, allowing Woodsworth students, faculty, and staff to see and be seen, as they are connected to the city and to each other.

A frit pattern developed over six repeating panes wraps the perimeter, combining access to natural light with a sense of traditional cloister-like enclosure. At points of termination or directional change, the frit disappears to provide uninterrupted, framed views of the urban campus.

This is the first University of Toronto building designed to meet a projected annual energy consumption performance target 40 percent better than Performance Path defined in ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2013, Section 11. Key sustainable strategies include 40 percent maximum window-to-wall ratio, R-25 wall assemblies, R-40 roof insulation, and a dedicated outdoor air system (chilled beams/radiant slabs) with improved air-side heat recovery and demand control ventilation.

CLIENT University of Toronto | ARCHITECT TEAM Alar Kongats (MRAIC), Tom Ngo (MRAIC), Amie Lee (MRAIC), Bosung Jeon, Courtney Ho, Paul Dolick, Fotini Pitoglou, Dane Halkiw | STRUCTURAL/ENVELOPE (BUILDING SCIENCE) Entuitive | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/SECURITY/IT/DATA/AV Smith + Andersen | SUSTAINABILITY/ENERGY MODELLING Footprint | LANDSCAPE North Design Office | CIVIL MGM Consulting Inc.| SHORING Terraprobe | COST Altus Group | BUILDING CODE/LIFE SAFETY/ACCESSIBILITY Arencon | ACOUSTICS/NOISE AND WIND RWDI | HERITAGE ERA Architects | FOOD SERVICES Cini-Little | VERTICAL TRANSPORTATION National Elevator Consulting | TRAFFIC LEA Consulting | URBAN PLANNING Bousfields Inc. | AREA 4,620m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Tender & Award | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2024

Projected Energy Use • ENERGY REDUCTION 40.6% | TOTAL ENERGY USE 2,036 MMBtu | ENERGY USE INTENSITY (EUI) 141.3 kWh/m2/year | GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INTENSITY (GHGI) 15.3 kg CO2e/m2

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF MERIT

This project elevates the architecture of a service building. The building is largely designed to house vehicles for essential services, and offsets the energy and carbon in the vehicles’ use with its net zero carbon and net zero energy targets. The building shape is sculptural and purposeful, most notably the photovoltaic roof that unifies the individual sheds of the building, providing optimal angles for solar energy capture and clerestories to the occupied interior spaces. A mass timber structure is used to reduce embodied carbon, helping the project target net zero carbon certification. There’s something seductive and attractive about the resulting form that is a site-specific response to capturing solar energy. -Jury Comment

As the climate crisis accelerates, buildings need to meet increasingly stringent energy performance and embodied energy criteria. How can architects meet these targets, while still delivering architecturally compelling buildings that accommodate complex programs?

By developing a strong architectural idea derived from net zero strategies, Diamond Schmitt Architects and gh3*’s design aims to create a distinctive building with exceptional environmental performance. The boldly angular Multifunction Paramedic Station contains emergency vehicle bays, adjoined by an administrative and educational block, and topped with a dramatic sawtooth roof. The roof is covered with photovoltaic panels, and each bay is optimally angled and rotated for maximum solar capture. A mass timber structure reduces the building’s embodied energy. Overall, the Paramedic Station exceeds the city’s zero emissions mandate, aiming to achieve both zero emissions and net zero energy.

Reaching these targets means going beyond the use of mass timber and photovoltaic arrays. The building is equipped with a high-performance envelope, triple glazing, a well-calibrated window-to-wall ratio, decoupled ventilation, and hydronic floors that heat and cool the building through geothermal wells. The design must also address heat losses through the 12 overhead vehicle doors, and the heat required to temper the large volumes of make-up air for the vehicle bays.

For the overhead doors, interior vestibules were introduced on both sides of the vehicle bay—making this the first ambulance facility in Canada to do so. This design feature conserves 15 percent of the entire building’s energy.

A tilted south-facing solar wall conserves a further 15 percent of the entire building’s energy. Fresh air is warmed by the south sun on the dark metal cladding, rising into energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) on the roof. The ERVs deliver the heated air to the vehicle bays through low-level displacement ventilation cabinets. High-level return air ducts draw air back to the rooftop ERVs, using latent heat to further preheat incoming air.

The dramatic roof, too, does more than generating solar energy: the form also allows for clerestory windows to bring natural light to the building’s interior spaces. Daylit spaces include the vehicle bays for 40 ambulances and 20 supervisor vehicles, locker areas for 700 staff and visitors, fitness facilities, along with classrooms, seminar rooms, and a lounge for limited-duty first responders.

On the exterior, the geometry of the angled roof lines extends into the landscape, with roof drainage feeding into large rain garden detention basins that punctuate the site with swaths of native trees and shrubs in shapes that complement the building’s massing.

The Paramedic Station adjoins Highway 401, and its distinct form will be identifiable even to drivers travelling at high speeds. It aims to act as a signal to the rest of the emergency divisions—and to the city at large—that stringent energy and program objectives can be achieved in tandem with an aesthetically sophisticated design.

CLIENT City of Toronto / Toronto Paramedic Services | ARCHITECT TEAM Diamond Schmitt—Michael Leckman (MRAIC), Tristan Crawford, Martin Gauthier, Parisa Kohbodi, Amir Azadeh, Laura Hutchinson. Gh3*—Pat Hanson (FRAIC), Elise Shelley, John McKenna, Mark Kim, Richard Freeman, Arslan Abbas, Charles Kim | STRUCTURAL/ENVELOPE RJC Engineers | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/AV/IT/ENERGY MODELLING Integral Group | LANDSCAPE gh3* | CIVIL Morrison Hershfield | TRANSPORTATION BA Consulting Group Ltd. | COST Turner Townsend | AREA 8,175m2 | BUDGET $49.7 M | STATUS Construction Documentation | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2024

Projected Energy Use • ENERGY USE INTENSITY (EUI) 139 kWh/m2/year | THERMAL ENERGY DEMAND INTENSITY (TEDI) 39.4 kWh/m2/year | GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS INTENSITY (GHGI) 5.6 kg CO2e/m2 | WATER USE INTENSITY (WUI) 0.5 m3/m2/year

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT STUDENT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

This is an attempt to really understand a material. It has principles that are reminiscent of Indigenous ways of knowing, in its desire to develop a deep understanding of a material as a foundation for a later architectural exploration in built form. While the architectural application of this research could be more fully developed, the project’s sensitive nature, graphic presentation, and reflection on the traditional technique of stacked timber construction are all commendable. -Jury Comment

A tiny, aphid-like insect is felling the towering eastern hemlock forests of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. Native to East Asia, and first detected in North America in the 1950s, the hemlock woolly adelgid was likely transported to the continent in nursery stock from Japan. This invasive species has transformed hemlock forests into ghostly landscapes of dead and dying trees along the eastern U.S. coast and is now making inroads in Canada.

Hemlock House pays tribute at a critical moment to the threatened eastern hemlock. “There is no current global strategy to utilize wood from dead or dying eastern hemlocks and most trees are left to rot,” Odile Lamy writes in her thesis. “This project proposes to capitalize on this naturally available wood to construct a building that will celebrate the tree.”

The project is sited in Quebec’s Eastern Townships in the Parc municipal de Frelighsburg, where eastern hemlocks are still thriving. The municipality is currently designing a 10-year forest management program to improve the vitality of this undermanaged site. Hemlock House aims to increase landscape connectivity for the region’s residents and tourists, while accommodating forest management activities such as lumber and bark drying. It celebrates the shaded atmosphere
of eastern hemlock groves; the building is “a temple in the half-light.”

Wood, Lamy writes, is “an archive of the environment in which the tree has lived; its growth rings, knots and grain bear witness to the geological and physical past of the forest.” The project draws from the traditional pièce sur pièce construction of log cabin-style buildings, more specifically from Métis folk houses, and inverts a typical construction detail to expose the full cross section of logs in the interior. Hemlock trunks are conical, tapering as they climb. Timber for Hemlock House preserves this tapering. Local eastern hemlocks, harvested while still alive, form the columns that create a crib frame for the dead trees, decimated by the adelgid, that are stacked horizontally between them, with thick and tapered ends alternating in each row.

Due to the pandemic, the execution of the project ended up being very different from the design-build approach Lamy had originally envisioned. Holed up in a small urban apartment, she turned to etching, which in some ways parallels Hemlock House itself. The project conceives building as a process extending from the growth of a tree to its reconfiguration as a dwelling. In etching, the act of drawing is transmuted into the physical processes of carving and printing.

“When the adelgid reaches Frelighsburg, no more live hemlocks will watch over the Hemlock House, but the memory it encloses will endure,” writes Lamy.

Location: Parc municipal de Frelighsburg, Quebec

Advisor: Martin Bressani

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WINNER OF A 2021 CANADIAN ARCHITECT STUDENT AWARD OF EXCELLENCE

This project offers a reflection on the reuse of abandoned offshore oil rigs, as well as an architectural solution that is well developed at different scales of experience. The duality between the industrial and natural landscapes—as well as the potential of a repeated typology for the rehabilitation of this type of infrastructure—are topics that are especially pertinent to our present times as we abandon fossil fuels and leave the infrastructure of extraction behind. -Jury Comment

First fact: hundreds of the approximately 1,862 oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico have been abandoned. Second fact: Between 1932 and 2020, Louisiana lost 5,000 km2 of coastal agricultural land. Idea: Relocate and consolidate some of the abandoned platforms off the Louisiana coast and repurpose them as food production hubs and experiential islands in a place where previously cultivated land has eroded into the sea.

The Mechanical Landscape thesis envisions the transformation of structures designed to extract the natural resource of oil into islands that simultaneously produce a wide range of crops and stimulate the economy by providing a series of new day-trip visitors’ destinations. Floating platforms are moved, anchored, and in some cases stacked; in others, juxtaposing multiple hulls creates larger surface areas. Three ‘islands’ are established in proximity: one for mariculture and one for agriculture, with a desalination plant situated between them and serving both of them.

The Maricultural Island’s farming operations include an algae development basin, rice cultivation, and a fish hatchery, with a chute for releasing mature fish into the sea. On a lower level, tourists can buy fresh ocean produce in a market and visit a diving pool before reboarding the vessel that ferried them to this destination.

Agricultural Uplands, the second island, has two plateau-like levels, with programming areas for intensive culture as well as a seasonal market, kitchen and food processing area on the lower and passive market gardening on the deck above. Laboratories are concentrated on smaller platforms elevated above and offset from the market gardening fields.

The third island, the Desalination Plant, offers visitors an opportunity to do more than gawk at labs and machinery: its top deck houses fruit tree gardens and an open-air swimming pool with expansive views.

In her thesis, Tyana Laroche describes abandoned oil platforms as “marine carcasses” and resists the idea that these megastructures deserve the “revalorization” of being allowed to deteriorate into offshore industrial ruins. Far better to repurpose them as more positive models of production, consumerism, and distribution—without enlisting design to obscure their environmentally problematic past lives. Mechanical Landscape, she writes, is “a condensation of layers in constant relation to one another, formalizing a balance between life, death and the rebirth of a neglected structure.”

Location: Gulf of Mexico

Advisor: Jean Verville

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This image is really deliberate in the way it is staged, and confident in its tight frame, setting itself apart from the way you might expect an architectural interior to be captured. It reminds the jury of how, at the cusp of medieval and Renaissance imagery, certain images presented the beginning of an understanding of depth and perspective within an otherwise flat image. This photo arrests you with the detail and short perspective in the foreground, and simultaneously draws you deeper into the image. It has playfulness, and an element of mystery.  – Jury Comment

This photo was taken in the house of an actor-director couple, designed by architect Jean Verville. The setting—mixing architecture, mystery, and theatricality—was perfect for the actress Sophie Cadieux, who played along for the photo session. An active participant throughout the course of the day, she strolls naturally into the frame of the photo, composed to highlight the verticality of the dwelling. While the photo only hints at the play of natural light in the house, it is marked by Cadieux’s ease of movement through the space, and the sense of a fleeting moment captured on camera.

Is this a staged image with nostalgic accents, or the natural poise of a woman in her home? Perhaps a bit of both at the same time.

Location: Jean Verville, MSO Play/Pause Space, 2020, Montreal, Quebec

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This photo has a quaintness and gentleness, especially with the elements of the white wooden ladder and the tree in front of the cabin. It matches the story of the tiny house—created by a teenager during the pandemic to retreat from her family—to an appropriate technique, taking a soft approach to the image. – Jury Comment

15-year-old Ila Martel built this Tiny House as a reprieve from her family of five when pandemic lockdowns persisted in 2020. When her family moved to their small farmhouse to escape the Covid-y city air, Ila had the idea to build a space of her own where she could go to write and be creative and occasionally sleep away from her family.

So she engaged the help of her engineer dad. Together they sourced lumber from the hardware store and gathered pallets and windows left by farmers on the side of the road. She designed the windows to swing out for ventilation, learned to roof and to use board and batten. Altogether, the build took between three and four months, mostly on weekends and relying heavily on a trial-and-error approach. Thrilled to have a place of her own, she lived out of her Tiny House for an entire summer. The inside boasts a canvas sleeping hammock, a tiny desk and stool, books, a typewriter, a string of fairy lights, wallpaper comprised of pages torn from hip magazines, and teenage ennui. A rain barrel and solar generator keep things functional. But, because the structure sits on pallets and because she forgot to anchor it, one day last fall the wind huffed and puffed and blew her little house down. She’s since fixed it.

Location: Ila Martel, Tiny House, 2020, Mulmur, Ontario

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