Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal is a landmark on Mount Royal with significant cultural and natural value. The most visited building in the province, it welcomes some 2 million visitors every year. The project, a new reception pavilion and reconfiguration of the Sacred Axis and exterior site, creates a newly contemporary yet respectful architectural identity through thoughtful and meaningful design strategies.

The first phase of the work aims to improve and facilitate visitor access to the entire site, including for people with limited mobility, by creating a new indoor route connected to pilgrimage services: reception, boutique and food services. It also includes the creation of a public square, to be named la Place de la Sainte-Famille (Holy Family Plaza) and the relocation and refurbishment of the Oratory’s carillon—one of only 11 carillons in Canada and the only one in the province of Quebec.

The carillon has a rich history. The Paccard Bell Foundry of Annecy-le-Vieux in France originally cast the bells for the Eiffel Tower, but they were never installed. In 1954, the carillon was loaned to the Oratory, and generous pilgrims later purchased the bells for the sanctuary. Their distinct sound now offers an opportunity to enhance pilgrims’ spiritual journey of ascension up the mountain.

The intervention is framed by the heroic architecture of the Oratory, in dialogue with the mountain’s topography and morphology. It enhances the site as a place of welcome, peacefulness, luminosity and warmth. Its superimposed inside and outside journeys harmoniously merge the natural and built elements of the mountain.

The INSTRUMENT, the rift, The topography

The architectural intent is to showcase the bells: to celebrate them with an architecture that acts as both an iconic element in the landscape and an acoustic enhancement, a musical instrument in its own right. The mapping of the sound shapes the ascension, emphasizing the sensory experience and eliciting a sympathetic material response.

We developed the architectural language around the following three significant elements, in continuity with the vocation of the place and with sensitivity to its insertion into Mount Royal.

THE INSTRUMENT: The sound of the carillon invites visitors inside, accompanying them through the sequence and experience of the Oratory. Inside, it unfolds into an architectural gesture in wood and natural light, guiding visitors to the Oratory through an ascent into spaces of welcome that invite strolling, discovery, shopping and refreshment.

THE RIFT: The rift is the result of an incision into the slope of Mount Royal. Entirely made of concrete, it allows for the insertion of the carillon; it guides visitors’ indoor journey, encouraging pause and contemplation of indoor and outdoor views, accompanied by the uplifting melodies of the carillon.

TOPOGRAPHY: The pavilions emerge from the topographic strata that become terraces and plazas. The excavated rock of Mount Royal is reconstituted as gabion faces. The stones, levitated, filter natural light, acting metaphorically like stained glass, revealing the essence of Mount Royal.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: This is a wonderful project. Clear, restrained and poetically designed to enrich the broader urban context as well as the visitor’s experience of the building itself.

Jack Kobayashi :: It’s as ethereal as a graduate thesis with one important difference: it’s real. It’s beautiful, haunting, gorgeous. It’s an anachronism in today’s fast-paced, over-stimulated society. It’s remarkable.

Steve McFarlane :: This project imagines a poetic orchestration of a symbolic procession and is beautifully restrained in its response to a prestigious and challenging site. Skilfully represented, the scheme demonstrates a deep understanding of place-making as it transforms the challenges of topography, history, and acoustics into memorable and resonant space.

Credits

CLIENT:: Saint-Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal
STRUCTURAL EMS:: Calculatec, Elema
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL::  Bouthillette Parizeau, BPA
CIVIL:: Marchand Houle
LANDSCAPE:: Version Paysage
LIGHTING:: Ombrage
CARILLON CONSULTANT:: Patrick Macoska
BUDGET:: Withheld
COMPLETION:: 2020

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The “Above Zone” forms part of the Edmonton Valley Zoo’s ambitious redevelopment of its historic Children’s Precinct. With immersive landscapes and a “child’s eye view” as points of departure, the broader plan for the precinct comprises four primary modes of spatial engagement as means of defining a new conceptual framework for the Zoo: Under, Between, On, and Above. These abstract experiential types structure the new exhibits based on how each species engages physically with that landscape and promotes play as the primary mechanism for engaging with that landscape.

Immersive landscapes are those in which animals and humans alike are enveloped by a common habitat. This approach erases the boundaries and hierarchical divisions between animals and visitors found at conventional zoos. By engaging animals on their own terms and in their own habitats, visitors are better able to understand the high degree of interconnectivity between themselves, the animals they are viewing, and the world around them.

The Above Zone utilizes a tectonic language developed through exploratory models to blur the boundaries between built and natural environments, suspending disbelief and drawing the visitor out of the realm of the everyday. The materials selected will acquire a patina over time: the wood will become grey, while the board-form concrete will be overgrown with mosses and ivy. The project’s faceted surfaces are eroded to provide natural lighting throughout the spaces, while views of the landscape beyond are harnessed to animate its interior spaces. The building acts as a frame for its surroundings and will eventually be subsumed by its context, literally immersed within the site. Within the logic of this language, the Above Zone focuses on the experience of ascending from a grounded condition to one characterized by the dissolution of the tree canopy into light and sky.

The idea of a child’s geography, where imagination takes hold and reality takes a backseat to wonder, is another fundamental concept embedded in the design. For this, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. A child’s geography is an experiential or cognitive map that reflects heightened moments of emotion within the promenade that resonate within a child’s long term memory. This mapping isn’t definitive or quantifiable; instead, the map is an accumulation of moments of engagement with habitats and animals that create a disproportionate effect on a child’s perception of the environment.

In addition, parallel play opportunities will buttress the visitor’s imagination by providing moments of adrenaline, during which one can pretend to be one of the animals by mimicking similar physical acts. A child can climb in the net play and pretend to be a Gibbon, or cross the canopy walk between the aviaries and imagine life as an exotic bird or Tamarin.

Over time, the project aims to realize the Edmonton Valley Zoo’s desire to encourage conservation and stewardship in future generations of Edmontonians by creating a meaningful connection between visitors, animals, and the ecologies and ecosystems that they share.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: The project has a fresh and exuberant approach. It is a delightful rethinking of the experience of visiting the zoo.

Jack Kobayashi :: This design packs more “programing punch” per square metre than any other. The building is loaded with functional requirements—often incompatible, discordant and requiring separation – and manages it all in a tight, cohesive package. If this were a gymnastics competition, we would award this project a bonus for artistic interpretation combined with a high degree of difficulty.

Steve McFarlane :: The project resolves a simple path on a really tight site with fantastic programmatic richness and a wonderfully engaging complexity of experience. It displays considerable sensitivity in the design of the diverse animal habitat, while simultaneously harnessing the raw enthusiasm of child-play to the benefit of all ages.

Credits

CLIENT:: City of Edmonton/Edmonton Valley Zoo
EXHIBITS/LANDSCAPE:: Leap Design Works
STRUCTURAL:: Read Jones Christoffersen Ltd
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL::  Williams Engineering
CIVIL:: CIMA +
LANDSCAPE:: Earthscape
INTERIORS:: MBAC & LEAP Design Works
AREA:: 3,000 F2 (Exterior Exhibit)
BUDGET:: Withheld
COMPLETION:: 2020 (Projected)

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The project started with a simple question: How do we design a house that will last a hundred years or more, and accommodate multiple generations of family members to grow up and grow old together?

Full House is a multi-generational housing typology developed for a Vancouver site. While this particular project is a contextual response to the economic, social and urban conditions of this specific place, urban centres across Canada are experiencing skyrocketing real estate prices and, consequently, a general increase in the number of adult children living with their parents. In Vancouver, the average selling price has now surpassed $1,800,000 for a detached house, $850,000 for a townhome and $650,000 for a condo unit. As a result, multi-generational living is the only viable home-ownership option for many families.

The project is conceived as a five-bedroom home with a detached one-bedroom laneway dwelling. The home is reconfigurable to operate across a variety of traditional program scenarios through the orientation of a pivot door —inspired by the famous 1927 photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s door at his studio at 11, rue Larrey in Paris. The device is a pivoting steel plate partition that can occupy three possible positions; adjusting the position of the door alters the architectural programming of the suites in the house.

The life of the house is understood as existing at any point in time through three scenarios that allow flexibility, facilitated by the operation of the Duchamp Door:

Scenario A / Two discrete dwelling units: three-bedroom suite + two-bedroom suite

Scenario B / Two discrete dwelling units: four-bedroom suite + one-bedroom suite

Scenario C / One large multi-generational home: five-bedroom suite

Regardless of whether the situation is a matter of choice or financial necessity, the benefits of multi-generational living are becoming widely recognized. These include financial support, readily available childcare to provide mutual benefits for young and old, less physical and emotional isolation for aging grandparents, and emotional bonding and closeness across generations. These emotional, physical, and financial benefits are experienced by all family members. Adult children living at home can save money while going to school or working. Older family members can find an enriched sense of purpose and meaning by spending time with young children, and the demands of keeping up with kids —both physically and intellectually —helps grandparents stay active and feel younger. The benefits to grandchildren include learning empathy, care and respect for elders, as well as social skills through role-modeling.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: An innovative and elegant solution to a fairly complex problem: designing housing in a way that is flexible and reconfigurable to accommodate changing needs over time. Very thoughtful and imaginative.

Jack Kobayashi :: With one swing of a door, this project resolves three different housing scenarios in one building. It’s an extremely well-considered design throughout. The design starts with a housing lot, originally intended for one household, and shares it among four. The design makes a contribution towards resolving the housing crisis occurring in most major urban areas without up-ending the equilibrium of low-density living.

Steve McFarlane :: The jury was given several beautiful houses to consider this year, but this one stood out because its inventive morphology reaches well beyond the confines of the particular site. Clever and thoughtful spatial arrangements support an architectural slight-of-hand, addressing the nuances of collective and individual dwelling with the click of a single latch.

Credits

CLIENT:: Witheld
STRUCTURAL:: Fast + Epp
AREA:: 3,505 F2
BUDGET:: Withheld
COMPLETION:: Spring 2019

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River City 3 is the third phase of a large residential project on the eastern edge of downtown Toronto.

At its base, the design creates an open residential community that responds to the industrial nature of the area, yet incorporates and builds on the significant green infrastructure that Waterfront Toronto is bringing to this district. Born out of the fluidity of the Don River and the Richmond-Adelaide ramps, the concept of movement has had a major influence on the architectural approach of the complex. This can be seen in the dynamic formal language of the new buildings and the conceptual continuities that have been created throughout the site.

These connections exist over a number of elevations, made possible by the project’s signature tectonic forms: commencing at the corner of King and River Streets, where a large opening in the building façade occurs, these conceptual continuities provide a visual link to Woonerf Street and the interior space between Blocks 22 and 24. From this interior space, a green portion of the north façade of Block 22 rises toward the landscaped roof of that block’s parking structure. Linkages are likewise created between the mini-towers to connect to Don River Park to the east. (The Woonerf Street—a living street designed for pedestrians as much as for vehicles. The term derives from the Dutch word that literally means “living yard,” a narrow roadway with no traffic signs, wide enough to accommodate cars but people-oriented.)

Evoking the mineral-like characteristics of River City’s earlier phases, Phase 3 deftly addresses the issue of the larger urban environment.

In formal terms, the 28-storey tower is a continuity of the angular black volumes that give shape to the entire River City complex. This final, vertical volume is composed of the elements found on the site: angular crystalline minerals of black and white. Rising to provide views toward the surrounding cityscape and these elements, the tower conceptually erodes to symbolize this dual mineral nature: a solid black object inset with white diaphanous crystals. Facing downtown Toronto to the west, the tower serves as the vertical marker of the city’s eastern edge.

Surrounded by parks and public spaces, and very close to the downtown core, the entire four-phase River City project is designed for livability and maximum sustainability, with a mix of over 1,100 loft-style condominiums, family-oriented townhouses, and ground-floor retail. Spanning the area from King Street East to the new Corktown Common, it is a vital part of the revitalized West Don Lands and the city’s waterfront redevelopment that is well underway.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: It is a challenge to design an innovative condo building in Toronto. This project in an emerging neighbourhood does this extremely well, with bold composition and a distinct sense of place and context.

Jack Kobayashi :: This deserves an award because it’s important for architects to acknowledge when a condo tower is well executed and remarkable. Architects abandoned the suburbs long ago, but still decry the lack of design therein. We’re in danger of following the same path with condominium towers.

Steve McFarlane :: RC3 is admirable in staking out a territory of invention in the realm of the speculative condo tower. Bold in its formal strategies, the project responds confidently to its context while exploring the tensions between the rush of the overpass, the flow of the Don River, and the glow of downtown beyond.

Credits

CLIENT:: Urban Capital Proprety Group (David Wex)
STRUCTURAL:: Read Jones Christoffersen Ltd
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL:: Smith + Andersen
CIVIL:: R.V. Anderson
LANDSCAPE:: Claude Cormier + Associés
LEED CONSULTANT:: WSP
AREA:: 34,387 m2
BUDGET:: $64 M
COMPLETION:: 2018

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What if we as architects looked at designing for sustainability less as the epilogue of a design conversation (inclusion of low-flush toilets, geothermal, triple-pane glazing, etc.) but as a key driver in the overall form of our built environment? In Bjarke Ingels’ 2011 TED talk, “Hedonistic Sustainability,” he states that architecture should be more than just superficial 2D facades, that we need to see architecture as both an ecology and perhaps even an economy. How could architecture serve not only its inhabitants, but also enter into a dialogue with larger ecosystems outside of itself?

This question formed our departure point for designing a 20-unit multi-family building in Bankview, a hilly inner-city Calgary neighborhood with a diverse demographic and community-oriented lifestyle. We mined the potential of the banal, dissecting the design brief, by-law and building code requirements, site restrictions and budget to find hidden potential to inform our design. We discovered challenges and opportunities, such as 20 feet of elevation change from the north-west to the south-east corner of the site, restrictive setbacks and height limits, stringent landscape and amenity space requirements and a “community-centric” Area Redevelopment Plan that advocated for vibrant social spaces and “knowing your neighbour.”

We began developing massing models that explored a topographical allocation of density that addressed a number of challenges. We took advantage of the site’s steep slope by placing the parkade at grade, which pushes the rear units of the building up, resulting in a terracing effect that helps to democratize light and view for most of the units. We shifted the density between the north and south property lines to accommodate differing height restrictions, creating essentially three “bar buildings” that could be programmed with different housing types. The off-setting of these three bars results in a constructed topography clad in naturally weathered cedar and exterior green wall, informed by its place.

These formal moves allowed us to provide a diversity of housing types (townhome, loft, studio and flat), increase access to light and view for each unit, and perhaps most critically, turn what could have been a panoply of mono-functional flat roofs into a polyvalent roof, which effectively becomes an “amenity-scape.” This amenity-scape, while satisfying the stringent landscape and requirements for amenity space, introduces urban horticulture in the form of private gardens, vegetative roofs and apiaries at an unprecedented scale for inner-city Calgary. It also provides a place to walk the dog or get a breath of fresh air, encouraging spontaneous interaction among the building’s inhabitants. As such, GROW is not offering a “private silo” communal living, which is typical of inner-city Calgary. Instead, it will integrate into Bankview’s community ecology, breaking down the barrier of the private and the public.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: I am very pleased to see how well this project addresses the challenges of urban intensification and housing as a social construct. A creative approach to medium density housing that will have a positive impact on the lives of people living in this community.

Jack Kobayashi :: Many architects espouse bringing democracy into their designs. This project delivers it.

Steve McFarlane :: GROW punches way above its weight, leveraging the latent potential of the double-loaded housing typology to create inclusive opportunities for gardening and gathering. The range of suite types holds the promise of a diverse community.

Credits

CLIENT:: RNDSQR
STRUCTURAL:: Wolsey Structural Engineering
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL:: TLJ Engineering Consultants Inc.
CIVIL:: Hilco Projects Inc.
LANDSCAPE:: MoDA
LEED CONSULTANT:: WSP
AREA:: 19,450 F2
BUDGET:: Witheld
COMPLETION:: 2019

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The City of Mississauga is providing a new park and community centre as part of the overall Ninth Line Lands development between Highway 403 and 401. The project will serve this urban densification along the City’s western boundary, along a tributary of 16-mile creek, with a recreation centre and a 50-acre park. A fitness trail system around the park will connect with a series of new and existing pedestrian trails extending into the city fabric. The site will be a destination point in this system.

The community centre will be a focal point within the site with light-permeable cladding encasing a leisure and lap pool, triple gymnasium and multi-purpose rooms. For preferred solar orientation, the elemental form and the sports field face each cardinal direction. Reclaimed topsoil has been used to create a new topography on this relatively flat former agricultural field. These small rolling hills are situated at the edges of the sports fields and the central green lawn to create informal seating and destination points within the site.

The building appears as a simple form within the landscape, but reveals a heavy timber structure beneath its expanded metal mesh envelope and a complex internal ceiling of forms used to control light and sound.

A change room and service bar flank the pool and gymnasium, which are fully glazed towards the amenity spaces. The change room corridors are glazed so that some of the internal workings of the community centre are visible to those arriving at the facility. The building’s overhangs provide covered connections and act as shade structures for the adjacent playground and splash pad, as well as covered bicycle parking and a dry walking track around the building.

A series of activities have been grouped together under an undulating ceiling. The gym, lobby and pool have been covered by a stretched membrane assembly shaped to reflect and absorb both sound and natural light. These inverted peaks form continuous loops over each pool, the lobby and the gym courts. They are lined with LED light fixtures highlighting the spaces within the space. Micro perforations in the membrane ceiling let sound pass through to acoustic insulation. Natural light drops into the space from a series of skylights above, reflecting off the membrane ceiling. The aim, beyond the practical function of eliminating glare and excess heat gain, is to provide more enigmatic space with this slightly subtle source of light, like a lit cavern of some sort.

The gym, lobby and pool are wrapped with glulam framing, which extends outwards to form a deep overhang and is clad in expanded aluminum mesh which permits filtered light through to the building. Glazing units connect directly to the glulam columns by means of a toggle system set between the light and directly fastened to the glulam columns. The result is a robust wood structure clad in a very simple glazed curtain.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: Simple and bold, this project delivers a great amenity for its community. It is very accomplished.

Jack Kobayashi ::This project uses simple, utilitarian materials like expanded metal lath to create a hardy, maintenance-free finish with delicacy and delight.

Steve McFarlane :: The simple plan deploys the program quite succinctly, freeing up other resources to artfully modulate daylighting and views. Simple gestures in the section create spatial variety and richness with modest means.

Credits

CLIENT:: City of Mississauga
STRUCTURAL:: Blackwell
MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL:: Smith + Andersen
CIVIL:: EMC Group
LANDSCAPE:: MJMA
SPORTS FIELD LANDSCAPE:: John George Associates
LEED CONSULTANT:: Smith + Andersen / Footprint
AREA:: 75,000 F2
BUDGET:: $43 M
COMPLETION:: January 2020

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Hidden behind the rolling fog and dense forests of Indian Arm Provincial Park lie the time-worn hydroelectric generating stations of Buntzen Lake. Built in 1903, Buntzen was the first hydroelectric facility in British Columbia and has supplied Vancouver with inexpensive, sustainable electricity for over a century. Today, much of this infrastructure has gone offline, leaving behind an impressive legacy of unique hydropower structures in desperate need of a new life.

Buntzen’s structures have become symbols of place identity. They preserve memory, help us shape our understanding of the past and offer a site of new possibilities for future generations. While never intended for people, this remarkable network of buildings, tunnels, and turbines contain rare spaces with qualities not replicable in new construction. Electric Space proposes a phased adaptive reuse strategy that reimagines Buntzen’s decommissioned hydroelectric facilities as conduits for newly emergent, renewable energy industries and programmatic opportunities.

Phase 1  CATALYST responds to the Provincial Park’s lack of a formal entry and suggests transforming the powerhouse into a hybrid building that combines a park visitors’ centre with a micro algae research facility. In hybridizing these two programs, the Powerhouse Research and Visitor’s Centre serves as a catalyst for new programmatic development throughout the park, while preserving the site’s legacy of renewable energy production.

Phase 2  CONNECTION transforms the sluice gates and hydraulic tunnel into a vertical circulation network, connecting ocean and lake. Grafting onto the sluice gates, a small funicular allows visitors to travel 500 vertical feet along rusty pipes to the mouth of the hydraulic tunnel. Exiting the tram, visitors enter a dark tunnel and then, travelling along an elevated path, walk towards a light in the distance. At the end of the tunnel, visitors arrive to the abandoned surge tank: an oculus inside the mountain, open to the sky above. Once there, visitors enter a glass elevator car that ascends through the mountain’s core to the forest above. They then exit onto a bridge that frames a view back to Vancouver, the city that this facility has helped power for over a century.

Phase 3  REFLECTION repurposes the gatehouse that once controlled the intake of water into the hydraulic tunnel. Built in a lake, the gatehouse is quite often mostly submerged underwater, bearing unique weathering patterns from a century of rising and falling water. This proposal embraces wild water and suggests replacing the original floor with a floating wooden deck to embrace the lake’s seasonal transformations. Inserted in the deck are three tubs, built the same diameter and in the same location as the building’s original surge valve, which allow bathers to occupy a memory of the building’s former function.

When approaching these decommissioned hydroelectric sites, my goal went beyond simply wishing to preserve what exists. By reimagining their former function and pairing the qualities of these devices with the programmatic needs of their surroundings, my belief is that adaptively reusing decommissioned hydroelectric sites dramatically enhances the experiential capacity and place specificity of surrounding parkland. In this alternate vision, there is a powerful opportunity to decipher the invisible energy of a landscape, creating a sense of place through time by connecting memory, community and nature inside these extraordinary industrial spaces.

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Jury Comments

Shirley Blumberg :: I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which this project reimagines heritage Infrastructure.

Jack Kobayashi :: The retouched historic photo has an iconic character that has stuck with me. The balance of the submission exudes a high level of competency. The project proposes creative, adaptive reuse solutions against the backdrop of Vancouver’s ongoing struggle to preserve its building heritage.

Steve McFarlane :: This project proposes an engaging way forward for our inventory of abandoned infrastructure. It undertakes a thoughtful reading of the specific buildings and site while imagining new programs that reinvigorate their relevance to modern life. The treatment of historic elements and their relationship with new interventions explores valuable questions about how new and old can coexist.

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