A Balanced Approach: Jury Comments on the 2024 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence
The 2024 Canadian Architect Awards were tightly contended. Over two days of deliberation in October, jurors Andrea Wolff, Matthew Hickey, and D’Arcy Jones considered 143 entries to arrive at a selection of four Awards of Excellence winners and six Award of Merit winners. They also considered 35 student entries—the top architecture thesis projects in Canada as nominated by their schools—to select three Student Award of Excellence winners.
Photographer Lisa Stinner-Kun joined the jury to select one Photo Award of Excellence winner and two Photo Award of Merit winners. In our newly introduced Student Photo category, one entry was selected to receive a Student Photo Award of Excellence.
This year’s winners expertly balance design ambition, sustainability considerations, and a humanistic social vision. Going beyond the expected resolutions to a given program, they dug hard to develop design solutions that leveraged existing contexts, minimized environmental impact, and were generous in their provision of amenity.
These qualities are especially evident in the winning projects which work closely with existing buildings. There is growing industry-wide realization that, in terms of sustainability, the greenest buildings are those that are already built. According to the AIA, around half of the current work of architects involves adaptive reuse, renovation, or additions to existing structures. The most successful of these projects not only show a deep appreciation of the social, historic, and cultural values embedded in existing buildings, but also integrate these values thoughtfully into new design interventions.
The Confederation Centre of the Arts Revitalization, by Abbott Brown Architects, renovates and carefully adds to the 1964 project by Affleck, Desbarats, Dimakopoulos, Lebensold and Sise—the first of Canada’s Centennial buildings. The project includes needed accessibility and energy upgrades, as well as the additions of a stage-sized rehearsal hall, new classrooms and learning areas for visual arts, theatre, and dance, and artist-in-residence spaces. A new street-level entrance creates a warm, open welcome, subtly softening the Brutalist design.
On the West Coast, the revitalization of the Tofino Fish Pier, by Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, transforms a different kind of historic structure—an artifact of industrial heritage. The original fish pier housed an ice plant that served the area’s deep-sea fisheries. The wooden structure for that ice plant remains at the heart of the design, with its large-scale spaces now being leveraged as gallery and gathering spaces. In a powerful pivot, the former colonial structures are being revitalized for use by Indigenous communities and fishers, recognizing and supporting their legally affirmed harvesting rights.
A third project involving an existing building—in this case, a major addition—is located near downtown Montreal. The Éva-Circé-Côté Library, by Lapointe Magne et associés architectes working in consortium with L’OEUF Architectes, expands a library currently housed in a former fire hall; the project restores the envelope of the heritage building and frames it with a triangular addition. Beyond its impressive sustainability figures—an EUI of 97.22 kWh/m2/year, a TEDI of 26.94 kWh/m2/year, and WUI of 0.081 m3/m2/year—the project conserves large existing trees to shade new spaces, reuses construction waste, and draws on local supply chains. It also encourages community agriculture and active transportation, reasoning that helping to instigate even small changes in the transportation and consumption habits of users can help to reduce the neighbourhood’s carbon footprint in an impactful way.
One of the winning student projects also engages deeply in the adaptive reuse of a building. Matthew Dlugosz’s thesis project, entitled Parkdale People’s Palace, proposes the renovation of an existing church in a central-west Toronto neighbourhood to become a local community food hub, with layered uses including a co-op grocery store, community kitchen, community garden plots, a flexible dining and co-working hall, and a farmer’s market.
Rosalie Laflamme’s thesis project, Heritage of a Rural Patrimony, demonstrates a similar sensitivity to its context—in this case, the rural centre of Petite-Rivière-de-Saint-François, Quebec. Casting an eye to rural industry, it proposes a centre for reviving traditional arts—combining areas for boat building, carpentry, maple syrup manufacturing, and preparing eels harvested through weir fishing. Like the program, the architecture of the paired buildings draws on vernacular forms and local materials.
Although it did not quite make the cut, another project that was much discussed by the jury was NinetySeven Victoria, by bnkc architecture + urban design. Located in Kitchener, Ontario, the project addresses the absence of affordable housing with an initiative to create a “campus of care”—a grouping of buildings that combines transitional housing, mental health and addiction support, and community food programs. The project includes a renovation and addition to an existing warehouse, as well as a new building on the host organization’s current site. The jurors applauded the approach of evolving a warehouse into a courtyard-centered campus, although they felt that the addition to the existing building could be handled with a more elegant touch.
Another group of winners that deal closely with their immediate surroundings in exemplary ways are urban infill projects. Montreal Old Port Infill, by architecture écologique’s Étienne Lemay, is a slim building that replaces a previous structure that burned down in 1959. While just 18 feet wide, it makes subtle allusions to its predecessor, adopting the previous building’s rounded corners and marking the height of the previous parapet with a change in stone texture.
Two infill projects are among the Toronto project winners. Annex House, the first built commission by Harry Wei’s firm WAO (Wei Architecture and Objects) combines three homes on a single-family lot. Units in the main house are interlocked and arranged to prioritize access to natural light, including on the lower level. The design aims to fit in, rather than stand out—elegantly integrating extra density into an established neighbourhood.
Located in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, 11 Brock Avenue, by SvN Architects + Planners, aims to deliver 40 new supportive and rent-geared-to-income residential units on a vacant lot. The units are grouped around a courtyard, providing daylight and a dedicated outdoor space for residents, while the street façade is a lightly playful composition, accented by soft curves that transform into a canopy and bench-height informal seating to extend a warm welcome to residents and neighbours.
A second project by SvN was also discussed by the jury, although in the end they felt that a more convincing deployment on an actual site would have been needed to consider it more thoroughly as a possible winner. Cabin Communities addresses the lack of options for unhoused people in Toronto by introducing prefabricated, mass timber cabins that could be rapidly built and deployed in neighbourhood vacant lots. The cabins are grouped around a central shared space with access to a community kitchen, dining area, washroom facilities, and laundry. Designed using Passive House principles and with residents’ comfort in mind, the cabins provide dignified, secure temporary homes as a step for residents to transition into more permanent housing.
Programmatic innovation is at the heart of several other projects. Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre, by hcma architecture + design and Dub Architects, in collaboration with FaulknerBrowns, is a dynamic combination of a velodrome with a community sports hub—a departure from the usual configuration of velodromes as standalone facilities. The cycling track is positioned a full story above the centre’s ground-level infield courts, with a four-lane running track looping below and outboard the cycling area. Creating visibility between different sporting uses aims to generate broader community interest in track cycling and triathlon.
On a more modest scale, The Open, a project in Calgary by Public City Architecture, adds a sporting function to what might otherwise be a prosaic washroom project. Pairing a pickleball court with a green-roof-capped public washroom helps to generate activity and interest, adding to the vibrancy, visibility and safety of the facility.
Student Jose Power’s thesis, Ascending Worlds, brings an inventive eye to the space of the residential elevator. Reflecting on the early days of elevators—when the new mechanized devices were rendered as luxurious moving rooms, to dispel anxieties about living at height—Power explores the potential of elevators to serve as miniature social condensers. His whimsical catalogue of proposals includes retrofitting elevators as cocktail bars, mini-sized concert venues, and micro libraries.
Two final winning projects offer innovation in the realms of construction process and form. Mont-Laurier Library, by Chevalier Morales with L’OEUF Architectes, is based on a wooden reciprocal frame structure—a kind of waffle slab made out of mass timber. The design is engineered for disassembly, envisioning the future reuse of the building’s materials as its original use changes.
Warehouse Park Pavilion, a pavilion by gh3*, is located in an Edmonton park whose design is being led by CCxA. The barrel-vaulted, berry-red structure nods to mid-century styles, while also offering a distinctive contemporary presence. Its red colour alludes to the pavilion’s adjacency to a fire-pit-equipped warming plaza—a space meant to offer respite during wintry weather.
A final project that drew especial attention from the jury, although it was not ultimately selected as a winner, was Ja Architecture’s The Grounding Meadow. The project was the winning entry in a recent competition to revamp the landscape design for the Ontario Association of Architects’ headquarters in north Toronto. It proposes the removal of non-permeable hardscapes and their replacement with a wild meadow that allows for on-site stormwater treatment through filtration and sedimentation. The meadow is overlaid with a permeable metal grid that bridges to the parking and pedestrian entrances. The jurors were intrigued by the design strategy that tightly integrated architectural and landscape thinking—although this quality also, they felt, made it difficult to evaluate the project within the framework of an architectural competition.
Among the photos, one image by Montreal- and London-based photographer James Brittain stood out: a photo of École du Zenith, an elementary school recently completed by Pelletier de Fontenay and Leclerc Architectes. They were particularly taken by the image’s expert composition—which didn’t feel forced, but rather like a perfect found moment.
Another image by James Brittain was also selected for recognition: his image of Provencher_Roy’s Le Tour du Port in Montreal. The jury noted the compositional strength of an image that includes several existing structures in a way that gives them a sense of purposeful placement, and the natural lighting that allows the tower to appear transparent, rather than reflective.
Jacqueline Young of Stationpoint Photographic was the photographer behind the third professional photo selected for recognition. Her image of Douglas Cardinal’s St. Albert Place was noted for its craftsmanship, visible in the amount of detail brought out, and in treating the shadows as being as important as the architecture itself. The resulting image presents a lovely ambiguity between being an architectural image, and an almost abstract composition.
For the first time this year, our Photo Awards of Excellence included a category for students. One image stood out from the dozens received: Jenna Bosc’s photo of the Église Précieux-Sang, a Winnipeg church by Étienne Gaboury. The jurors found the image remarkable for its technical capture of detail, and for offering a surprising view of a familiar landmark.
Canadian Architect offers its congratulations to all of this year’s winners, and our sincere appreciation for all those who offered their work for consideration by our jury.
As appeared in the December 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine
See all the 2024 Awards of Excellence winners
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