About the Awards

Walter Francl, Peter Sampson and Diarmuid Nash intently pore over the 204 entries to the 2011 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence.

The Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence are given each year to architects and architectural graduates for buildings in the design stage. One of only two national award programs devoted exclusively to architecture, the Awards of Excellence have recognized significant building projects in Canada on an annual basis since 1968. Awards are given for architectural design excellence. In their assessment, jurors consider response to program, site, geographical and social context, and evaluate physical organization, structure, materials and environmental features.

This year's winners have been selected by a jury consisting of Diarmuid Nash of Moriyama & Teshima Architects in Toronto, Walter Francl of Walter Francl Architecture in Vancouver, and Peter Sampson of Peter Sampson Architecture Studio in Winnipeg. All three practitioners were in agreement that the unusually large number of strong project submissions made the selection of this year’s winners particularly difficult, but they nevertheless managed to pare down a rather lengthy shortlist to a group of projects that distinguish themselves through their highly sophisticated responses to ecology and architecture.

In order to provide a bit of context to the adjudication process, it is perhaps useful to include some of the jurors’ comments on their overall thoughts about the submitted projects and the current state of architectural practice. Additionally, some mention is made by the jurors of some exemplary projects that ultimately were not selected, but which succeed, for the most part, in their design objectives.

According to Walter Francl: “In number and quality, this year’s submissions achieved a very high standard and yielded more award-worthy projects than could be recognized. Viewing the work submitted this year, one is struck by the power of landscape, both urban and natural, to inform and inspire the architectural response. The variety and range is a reflection of the physical and cultural diversity of this country. Projects like the Fort York Visitor Centre and the West Coast Middle School engage the natural landforms in vastly dissimilar settings and to very different effect. Other projects, such as the Environmental Learning Centre on the west coast and the Two Hulls House on the east coast explore the bar as building form, evoking a heightened and calibrated appreciation of their bi-coastal settings. Smaller projects are particularly noteworthy and widely divergent, exemplars of projects that are of their place. St. Matthews Parish Church is constructed with a cultural and regional language unique to the north. The Storm Water Quality Facility in Toronto registers a deep and enigmatic note in its tough urban landscape. One submission that we seriously considered but which did not receive an award – Acton Ostry Architects’ English Bay Bistro in Vancouver – envelops its program in multi-coloured glazing that resonates with the celebrations and sunsets for which the site is famous. In form, materiality and expression, each is redolent of a particular environment or urban setting. A sustainable design narrative from earlier years that wore its fins and louvres as additive accessories has now matured. The best of the recent work, such as the Ryerson University Student Learning Centre and the UBC Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, has developed beyond these earlier themes into a convincing architectural language of fritted-glass cladding and deep-walled sections that can still achieve the required envelope performance.”

Diarmuid Nash speaks of form and landscape. “In reviewing the projects we selected as deserving of an Award of Excellence, I have noted that they are highly sculptural in nature; we seemed to gravitate to cantilevered box-like compositions such as the Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan, the Two Hulls House and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia. Abbey Gardens and the West Coast Middle School also possessed these similar geometric qualities that seemed to tie into and connect to the landscape; the box forms seem to float above as viewpoints from which to survey the surrounding context. In my view, two firms distinguished themselves not only for imbuing their work with strong sculptural qualities, but for their depth of process and experience: Saucier + Perrotte architects and gh3. Another firm worthy of mention is Winnipeg’s 5468796 Architecture Inc., who exhibited a certain rigour in their work.”

Projects that the jury took special notice of, but which they did not, unfortunately, honour with awards, generated substantial discussion and deserve some mention. Nash states: “These projects represent a broad range, from very simple pavilion structures to highly complex building programs, such as the Bibliothèque Marc-Favreau by Dan Hanganu architectes and the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal by Cannon Design/DCYSA Architects. The latter was a very compelling submission in that addressed the notion of making the complex simpler, and submitting a number of volumes or handbooks to demonstrate how this could be done. Some compelling diagrams and ideas emerged from these handbooks that could be applied to other equally complex projects. I liked the strong simplicity and purpose of the [aforementioned] English Bay Bistro and the gh3’s Borden Park Pavilion. Also, Saucier + Perrotte’s Centre Sportif Arrondissement de Saint-Laurent demonstrated a committed sculptural shape that conveys action and motion with strong and bold colours.”

A uniquely comprehensive approach was adopted by Peter Sampson in his personal assessment of the intensely engaging adjudication process, distilling his thoughts into three distinct strands and providing a useful framework for interpreting where the architectural profession is in Canada today and how it reflects and addresses current global realities.

The first strand concerns architecture and ecology. “As a member of this year’s jury I was curious about coming away with a sense of what it means to practice today in a country like this in the second decade of the 21st century. This year’s submissions confirm that accomplished responses to ecology and architecture exist in a variety of forms, approaches and actions. Present in many of the winning entries is an architecture charged with negotiating the massive and not yet fully realized implications of shifting global ecologies. In particular, a number of projects have close relationships to water, suggesting a predominant preoccupation with the current state of the environment and how Canadians practicing architecture situate themselves relative to this topic. Whether the relationship to ecology is aestheticized or acted upon, architecture’s immediate kinship to ecology – over, say, art – seems to be emerging as a central platform in this generation of work.”

Secondly, Sampson isolated a theme of residue and rehabilitation. “In a country dependent on fragile and failing infrastructures and on a straining relationship to nature, I am drawn to architecture that makes, invents, or rehabilitates ecologies at the residual edges and in-betweens of conventional development. Refreshingly different than the pseudo-scientific, gumpy fanfare of an engineered environmentalism of earlier decades, this generation’s response to the presence of ecology in our practice reveals promising work that is knowledgeable, confident, and playful in its commitment to place, people, technology and time.”

The third strand explores the inherent difficulty in the categorization of awards, and the distinctions to be made between that which truly qualifies as excellence and that which meets a standard of merit. “In thinking about a categorization of Awards of Merit, there were projects compelling enough to be meritorious, but not necessarily comprehensive enough to advance past a purely architectural idea. What compels me about most of the works that ended up receiving Awards of Excellence is that they presented a full activity of the architect who reveals how the components or events of an ecology surrounding an idea – in its complete and multi-faceted nature – can be negotiated.”