In our August issue
Our August issue celebrates the 12 winners of prestigious Governor General’s Medals in Architecture. The competition, established by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, continues a tradition initiated by the Massey Medals in 1950. This year’s winners include work from established firms such as KPMB Architects and Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, to studios celebrating their first Governor General’s Medal win, including La Shed architecture and Public City Architecture.
Another competition is the subject of this month’s editorial: the design competition for Block 2, facing Parliament Hill, which concluded earlier this summer with the selection of David Chipperfield and Zeidler Architecture’s design for the urban parcel—a choice I characterize as being laudatorily Canadian in its embrace of the site’s complexities.
With summer on our mind, we also travel to Reford Gardens (the Jardins de Métis) on the St. Lawrence estuary to survey its work on historic and contemporary gardens over the past 60 years, and its plans for the future. In Toronto, we spoke with Frank Gehry about his super-tall towers and the explosion of density downtown, and reflected on our collective future at Ed Burtynsky’s stunning In the Wake of Progress installation at Yonge-Dundas Square.
For summer reading, we suggest picking up Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster’s Growing Up Modern. If you’re thinking about catching up on architectural classics, take a look at our piece on the legacy of Howard Roake, the fictional protagonist of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, which puts the book in a different light.
Finally, as we gear up for the fall, an excerpt from Rick Linley’s new book on architectural firm financials offers some tools for assessing how your firm’s performance measures up against industry benchmarks.
-Elsa Lam, editor