Jason Nguyen, Assistant Professor in the history and theory of architecture, is the 2024 beneficiary of the Mayflower Research Fund, the research endowment established by a generous donor in 2018 to encourage and stimulate study in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, allowing for collaboration with other areas of the University where appropriate.

Nguyen’s awarded research project, “Crafting Contracts: Law and the Architecture of Commemoration in Old Regime France,” looks at building practice and the regulatory bodies that structured it during the 17th and early 18th centuries in France. The project considers how reforms in contract and cost management contributed to a reframing of the architect as a civil and commercial figure at the dawn of the modern age.

Beyond its scholarly impact, the research is significant because it provides an historical instance in which debates on labour and project financing helped establish the scientific and institutional grounds on which the profession of architecture first came and continues to be practiced.

“The award means quite a lot, and is a testament to the work that I have been undertaking since my doctoral dissertation,” says Nguyen. “[The award] will help advance the project through one of the last stages of research, which considers how the streamlining of contract documentation abetted the professionalization of the architectural trade during a period of momentous social and intellectual change.”

In particular, this facet of the project examines how the architect and theorist Pierre Bullet (1639-1716) streamlined the drafting, notarizing and filing of legal contracts into professional architectural practice, taking a lawsuit that he and sculptor Philippe Magnier filed in November 1698 against the estate of Jean Coiffier de Ruzé, the Abbot of Effiat, as a starting point.

In that injunction, Bullet and Magnier sought compensation for drawings and models they had completed for the abbot, who had hired the pair to design and build a sumptuously decorated family mausoleum in Paris. When the abbot died unexpectedly in October 1698, he left a mountain of unpaid bills and, ultimately, insufficient direction and funding to see the mausoleum finished. The French court’s eventual decision, which privileged the architect’s contract, stands as a legal precedent in the professionalization of architectural practice.

Remarkably, Bullet had warned of labour and fee disputes in his treatise Architecture pratique (1691). The book included sample contracts as guides for architects to measure decoration and draft expedient legal documents. This move helped to formalize the architect’s civil function as a coordinator of labour and arbiter of taste in an increasingly commercial society. That Bullet’s study unfolded alongside contemporaneous theorizations of the social contract by the philosopher John Locke and habits and customs by the jurist Montesquieu testifies to the period’s broader concerns for legal order and the structures of modern governance.

“Contemporary conversations in Canada about labour rights and the politics of project financing and development have parallels in this formative moment in architectural history,” says Nguyen, who plans to apply his Mayflower funding to research-related travel, publishing, and student training.

“The training will include primary and secondary source documentation, mapping and digital reconstruction of since-lost buildings,” he says.

Nguyen’s broader project, of which this research is a part, is titled Bodies of Expertise: Architecture, Labour, and Law in Old Regime France. 

“Ultimately,” he says, “Bodies of Expertise will argue that the effort to establish a legal category of expertise, rooted in the labour and law of building practice, directly contributed to the professionalization of architectural practice as well as the crystallization of public and commercial culture at the dawn of the modern age.”

Aspects of this research have to date been published in a variety of journals, including Grey Room, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture and Oxford Art Journal.

Drawing image: An anonymous drawing, likely after Pierre Bullet, depicts the Mausoleum for Antoine Coiffier de Ruzé, marquis d’Effiat, at the convent of the Filles de la Croix in Paris (c. 1698). The drawing is housed in the Nationalmuseum Stockholm in Sweden.

Associate Professor Aziza Chaouni is this year’s recipient of the World Monuments Fund (WMF) Watch Award, which the international preservation organization is bestowing on her for “her innovative work in heritage preservation through the implementation of sustainable technologies” in arid climates and elsewhere.

“Chaouni’s leadership and inventive solutions,” says the body, “have benefited multiple communities and sites across the globe, including her recent collaboration with Lafarge-Holcim Morocco on post-earthquake reconstruction efforts in [the Moroccan province of] Haouz.” 

It adds: “Her collaborations with WMF at Ontario Place in Canada, Old Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone and Maison du Peuple in Burkina Faso exemplify her ability to integrate cultural preservation with sustainable design.”

In addition to teaching at the Daniels Faculty, Chaouni (pictured below) is the founding principal of Aziza Chaouni Projects, a multidisciplinary design practice based in Toronto and Fez, Morocco. Among its primary mandates are “researching and making resilient and environmentally sensitive designs, buildings, neighbourhoods and cities.” 

Chaouni’s work has been recognized with numerous international awards, including top honours from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, which extolled projects in both its Global and Regional Africa and Middle East categories.

“Aziza Chaouni has been instrumental in merging architectural preservation with environmental sustainability, particularly in regions that receive low rainfall [and] where such efforts are crucial,” says Bénédicte de Montlaur, President and CEO of the WMF. “Her partnerships with World Monuments Fund in North America and Africa demonstrate her dedication and her resourceful approach.”

Since 1965, the WMF has raised $300 million to support more than 700 cultural-heritage sites in 112 countries. Through the World Monuments Watch—a biennial, nomination-based program—the organization uses cultural-heritage conservation to empower communities and improve human well-being. 

Chaouni will receive the 2024 Watch Award at the WMF’s annual Summer Soirée, which will take place in New York City, the organization’s home base, on Wednesday, June 5.

For further information on the body’s work, visit wmf.org. For more details on the 2024 Watch Award, click here.

Banner images: 1. Maison du Peuple, Burkina Faso. 2. Ontario Place, Toronto. 3. Old Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone.

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced that the Living Room Collective will represent Canada at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, from May 10 to November 23, 2025. 

Selected by a Council-designated selection committee, from among the group of five shortlisted candidates, the Living Room Collective will curate the next architecture exhibition at the Canada Pavilion. 

The creative team is led by bio-designer Andrea Shin Ling, alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, a lecturer and the Director of Applied Technologies at the Daniels Faculty, Vincent Hui, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science, and Clayton Lee, a curator, producer and performance artist.  

Together this group of architects, scientists, artists, and educators will work at the intersection of architecture, biology, and digital fabrication to situate architecture as an integral and supportive component of our ecosystem.  

“It is an incredible honor to have been selected to represent Canada at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale,” the Living Room Collective said in a statement. “In demonstrating the possibilities of a collaborative relationship with nature, we look forward to leveraging this global platform alongside national and international partners to engage in a critical dialogue around alternative design practices that can sit alongside contemporary carbon neutral building strategies.”  

Read the full announcement from the Canada Council for the Arts. 

About Living Room Collective   

Andrea Shin Ling is an architect and bio-designer who works at the intersection of design, digital fabrication and biology. Her work focuses on how the critical application of biologically and computationally mediated design processes can move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones. She is the 2020 S+T+ARTS Grand Prize winner for her work as Ginkgo Bioworks’ creative resident designing the decay of artifacts in order to access material circularity. Shin Ling is a founder of designGUILD, a Toronto-based art collective, and was a researcher in the Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab, where she worked on Aguahoja I, a 3D-printed bio-material pavilion. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Chair of Digital Building Technologies at the Institute of Technology and Architecture, ETH Zurich.

Nicholas Hoban is a computational designer, fabricator and educator. He works at the intersection of computational design, robotics, construction and simulation in pedagogy, research and practice. Hoban is the Director, Applied Technologies, at the Daniels Faculty and a lecturer within the Daniels technology specialist program, leading various research and teaching labs while developing curriculum for studios and seminars on advanced fabrication and robotics within architecture. His research focuses on the application of robotics within fabrication and construction, and how we can solve critical problems in geometry through integrated processes. Hoban was a lead fabricator and computational designer for two previous Venice Biennales: for the 2014 Canadian Pavilion for Lateral Office’s Arctic Adaptations and for the 2016 Swiss Pavilion for Christian Kerez’s Incidental Space.  

Vincent Hui is a distinguished professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science, imparting knowledge across diverse domains from design studios to digital tools. His pedagogical excellence has earned him multiple teaching accolades, as he delves into the intersections of architecture, fabrication and allied disciplines. With over 25 years of experience, his extensive publication portfolio focuses on design pedagogy, simulation, prototyping and technological convergence, complemented by a rich body of creative work showcased globally. Collaborating with esteemed organizations such as the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC), the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) and the Canadian Architecture Students’ Association (CASA), Hui endeavors to empower the next generation of designers, navigating emergent shifts in praxis. Committed to bridging academia and industry, he advocates for experiential learning initiatives and outreach endeavors for aspiring designers. His remarkable contributions have culminated in his induction into the esteemed RAIC College of Fellows.  

Clayton Lee is a curator, producer and performance artist. He is currently the Director (Artistic) of the Fierce Festival in Birmingham, England. He was previously the Director of the Rhubarb Festival, Canada’s longest-running festival of new and experimental performance, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Lee has also worked as Creative Producer on Jess Dobkin’s projects, including For What It’s Worth, her commission at the Wellcome Collection in London, England; as Curatorial Associate at the Luminato Festival; and as Managing Producer of CanadaHub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Lee’s performance projects have been presented in venues across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. He was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2023 Artists-in-Residence.  

Banner image from left to right: Andrea Shin Ling. Photo: Andrei Jipa; Nicholas Hoban. Photo: Nazanin Kazemi; Clayton Lee. Photo: Sam Frank Wood; Vincent Hui. Photo: Florencio Tameta.

The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA) has named Elise Shelley (Associate Professor, Teaching Stream) one of the 2024 inductees into its prestigious College of Fellows.

Fellows are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the profession of landscape architecture.

The College of Fellows will welcome the newest members—10 in total—during a ceremony at the CSLA’s next Congress, taking place in Winnipeg May 30 to June 1.

Investiture to the College is the highest honour that the CSLA, founded in 1934 to advance the art, science and practice of landscape architecture, bestows on its members. A jury of six Fellows, representing regions across Canada, selected the new ones based on extensive submissions documenting each candidate’s contributions to the profession.

“It is humbling and empowering to be nominated to the College of Fellows by my peers, as it validates that the work I do as an educator and practitioner has significance in the field of landscape architecture,” says Shelley, who is Director of the Faculty’s Master of Landscape Architecture program.

“As a CSLA Fellow, I will represent the Daniels Faculty and our students as I continue to pursue excellence for our program and for the discipline. I appreciate this honour and will do all I can to live up to the great work of those that have come before me.”

Since the inception of the CSLA’s College of Fellows in 1964, 270 members have seen induction, which comes with the designation “FCSLA.”

Shelley is being inducted in the categories of Professional University Instruction and Executed Works of Landscape Architecture. Other categories include Administrative Professional Work in Public Agencies or Government Service and Direct Service to the CSLA.

In addition to her roles at the Faculty, Shelley is the Director of Landscape at the Toronto-based interdisciplinary firm gh3*. Among her current projects are Warehouse Park in Edmonton and Olympic Plaza in Calgary, both collaborations between gh3* and CCxA. 

When the CSLA meets in Winnipeg at the end of May, it will be celebrating its 90th anniversary. For the full list of 2024’s inductees, click here

Dallas Fellini, graduating this semester from the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies program, has been awarded the 2024 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators.

Established in 2012, the prize is awarded annually to a Canadian curator or curatorial team under the age of 30 with the goal of supporting an inclusive national arts sector while recognizing the vital role of exhibitions in expanding awareness and art histories.

Exhibitions proposed by prize recipients are subsequently presented at the Art Gallery of Guelph, which announced Fellini’s win earlier this week.

Fellini (pictured above) is a Toronto-based curator, writer and artist whose research is situated at the intersection of trans studies and archival studies, interrogating the compromised conditions under which trans histories have been recorded and considering representational and archival alternatives to trans hypervisibility.

Their winning submission for the Middlebrook Prize, a proposed exhibition called Some kind of we, features works that approach or incorporate t4t sensibilities.

The term t4t is shorthand that emerged in the early 2000s in Craigslist personals ads, where it was used by transgender and transsexual people prioritizing relationships with other trans people.

Emphasizing networks of trans relationality, self-representation, cross-generational inheritance and desire and love between trans people, the exhibition will feature video works by B.G-Osborne with Benjamin Da Silva (pictured below) and by Mirha-Soleil Ross in collaboration with Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, as well as a print project by Cleopatria Peterson.

It’ll be paralleled by a “distributed exhibition” that speaks to trans histories of pre- and early-Internet activism and community building in Canada.

Fellini’s winning submission was selected by a three-person jury of esteemed curators: Alyssa Fearon (Director/Curator at Dunlop Art Gallery), Tarah Hogue (Curator of Indigenous Art, Remai Modern) and Renée van der Avoird (Associate Curator of Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario).

While Fearon noted the importance of the exhibition’s emphasis “on t4t relationality and visibility,” van der Avoird was struck by its highlighting of an “urgent topic with artworks that are compelling, moving and impactful.”

Hogue, meanwhile, noted the significance of the “distributed exhibition as a means of reaching trans audience members and reiterating the networks of support trans communities have created.” 

Some kind of we will be on view at the Art Gallery of Guelph later this year, from September through December.

For more information about the Middlebrook Prize and on past winners, visit middlebrookprize.ca.

Fellini portrait by Phillip Lý. Video still (7:22) from POLISHED, 2016, by B.G-Osborne in collaboration with Benjamin Da Silva, courtesy of the artist.

The Daniels Faculty’s Michael Piper, Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Architecture, is among the co-recipients of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s 2023 President’s Medal for Outstanding Housing Research.

Co-won with Janna Levitt, Principal of LGA Architectural Partners, and Samantha Eby, a sessional instructor at the Faculty, the prize was bestowed for ReHousing.ca, an online housing platform the trio co-created.

The award recognizes innovative and impactful research in Canadian housing, and includes a $25,000 prize to fund further knowledge mobilization and outreach.

The ReHousing initiative was developed by the joint academic and professional team to help make “missing middle” housing more attainable, showing “citizen developers” how to transform single-family homes into multiplexes.

Characterized by clear language and easy-to-read drawings that explain various types of multiplex housing as well as a step-by-step guide to how they can be achieved, the website offers options for a range of prospective users, including those looking to get into the housing market, mature homeowners who would like to remain in their homes while earning rental income for retirement, and those aiming to build additional housing for extended family, friends or rent-paying tenants.

“We’re excited that our housing catalogue has received national recognition, especially as all three levels of government are promoting design catalogues as a key approach to realizing small-scale infill housing,” Piper said on behalf of the winning team. “The CMHC grant will help us to expand awareness of the ReHousing project by creating more how-to videos and to share our research further through social media.”

Elements of the ReHousing plan were featured in Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia, the 2022-23 Daniels Faculty exhibition that Piper co-curated with Professor Richard Sommer.

Last year, Piper, Levitt and Eby used their research to contribute design analysis to the City of Toronto’s potentially game-changing multiplex-zoning legislation, and they are currently working on a second Toronto commission to study alternative neighbourhood densities.

ReHousing has also been funded by a grant from the Neptis Foundation, an independent charitable foundation that conducts and disseminates nonpartisan research, analysis and mapping related to the design and function of Canadian urban regions.

For more details about ReHousing, click here.

A rendering from the award-winning website ReHousing.ca envisions the addition of secondary housing on the site of a postwar bungalow. Image courtesy ReHousing.ca

Professor Mason White, Sessional Lecturer Kearon Roy Taylor and Assistant Professor Karen Kubey have been recognized by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) with 2024 Architectural Education Awards. The trio won for two separate projects in the category of Faculty Design. The Faculty Design Awards acknowledge work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching through creative design and design investigation and by promoting work that expands the boundaries of design. 

Colleagues at the Toronto-based practice Lateral Office, co-founder White (pictured above at right) and associate Taylor won for “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories,” an installation that examines domestic life in eight Arctic nations by situating it within broader sociocultural, economic and geopolitical contexts. Their partners on the winning team include Lateral Office co-founder Lola Sheppard of the University of Waterloo and Matthew Jull and Leena Cho of the University of Virginia. 

Exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” presents eight narratives of inhabitation from each of the countries that lay claim to the Arctic—Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the U.S.—to reveal deep and complex connections between domestic space and the larger territory.  

A series of rooms within eight houses juxtaposes the distinct artifacts and architectures of everyday life in the Arctic with territorial narratives that expose the interlinked far-flung contexts shaping the domestic scenes. 

In the process it addresses issues of transnational politics, Indigenous self-determination and radical socio-environmental adaptation in one of the 21st century’s most complex and contested regions.  

The installation “Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories” was exhibited as part of the Across Borders series at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Models were arranged as a roundtable assembly representing different regional challenges. Photos by Giorgio Lazzaro

An urbanist specializing in housing design and social justice, Kubey (pictured at left in the banner) won her ACSA Award, along with Neeraj Bhatia of the California College of the Arts and Ignacio González Galán of Barnard College, for “Aging Against the Machine,” a research project that looks at aging not as a problem to be solved but as a life stage facing a range of barriers—physical, social, financial and cultural—that make it difficult to grow older with dignity and in community. 

Part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons, the project builds on past and ongoing work in the California community of West Oakland, a culturally diverse and historically activist neighbourhood where older residents nonetheless face precarious living conditions, insufficient public amenities and limited caregiving options.  

It was developed by examining, connecting and expanding on existing initiatives there and by consulting with and amplifying the voices of its residents, who contributed through a series of roundtables and conversations. 

“Aging Against the Machine,” a commissioned research project overseen by the Daniels Faculty’s Karen Kubey and others, was part of a 2022 Center for Architecture exhibition entitled Reset: Towards a New Commons. Photos by Asya Gorovitz and Miguel de Guzman

Among the project results were proposals in a range of scales, from interior home renovations to collective land-ownership models and intergenerational housing projects. In particular, diverse spaces for commoning and networks of care at the scale of the building and the neighbourhood are integrated with public social programs and mutual aid initiatives, ultimately contributing to an intersectional, community-based approach to aging. 

According to ACSA, award winners are selected for their ability to inspire and challenge students, to expand the architectural profession’s knowledge base and to extend their work beyond academia into practice and the public sector. 

Winners of the Faculty Design Award are chosen in particular for how their work expands the boundaries of design through formal investigations, innovative design processes, addressing justice, working with communities, advancing sustainable practices, fostering resilience and/or centering the human experience. 

For a full list of 2024 ACSA Award winners, click here. 

Lukas Pauer, an Assistant Professor and inaugural Emerging Architect Fellow at the Daniels Faculty, has been awarded the 2024 AIAS/ACSA New Faculty Teaching Award.  

The annual award, sponsored jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), recognizes excellence and innovation in teaching during the formative years of an architectural teaching career. 

Pauer, who originally joined the Faculty as an Adjunct Professor in 2021, is also the founding director of the Vertical Geopolitics Lab (VGL), an investigative practice and think-tank at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology and media dedicated to exposing intangible systems and hidden agendas within the built environment. 

“All of my courses relate to aspects of space and power in the built environment but range in scale from the built object to the city or the polity,” says Pauer. “A key component of my academic practice is to serve the empowerment of marginalized, underrepresented, and vulnerable individuals and communities.” 

A scene from the Counterhegemonic Architecture thesis research studio course during a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal.

When it comes to his pedagogical approach, Pauer emphasizes removing hierarchical barriers between instructors and students. “I focus on the fact that they [students] will soon become my colleagues, often in just a few years’ time. Rather than a rigid hierarchy with instructors and critics being the sole possessors of knowledge, I want to open it up and make more horizontal dialogues possible.” 

This dialogue proves particularly useful in the context of studio-based learning. “Especially in design, there are often multiple approaches to solving problems, which is why I tend to actively encourage my students to challenge me,” he says, adding: “I often ask students to comment on each other’s projects individually. By inviting students to have just as much of a voice, the studio not only becomes an inclusive but also an authentic environment in which future practitioners can meet to inspire and learn from each other.” 

At Daniels, Pauer teaches at both the graduate and undergraduate level, including a year-long Master of Architecture (MARC) design research studio that investigates space and power in an effort to expose, challenge and reconstitute the pervasive and ongoing reality of imperial-colonial expansion.  

MARC students in the Counterhegemonic Architecture (ARC3020) studio have produced diverse theses (snapshots of which can be seen above) that range from a proposal for a pavilion at an international horticultural exposition that comments on the Turkish state’s colonial displays of progress to protest on behalf of the Kurds of Hasankeyf (“An Archive of Memories Washed Away” by Liane Werdina) to a temporary gallery exhibition on the cyclical push-pull nature of countries seeking to actively control the physical manifestation and collective memory of their national identity and history (“Forward Not Back, Reconsidering the Past in a Future Ukraine” by Bryson Wood) and a design for a mixed-use high-rise building and accompanying professional practice manual intended to empower residents of Toronto’s Chinatown (“Seeing through Transit-led Displacement in Toronto’s Chinatown” by Christopher “Chris” Hardy).  

In the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) program, Pauer teaches Close Readings in Urban Design (ARC253), which has the overarching hypothesis that public space isn’t actually “public” for everyone—a theme that Pauer considers a throughline between research and teaching.  

“In many ways this award feels full circle,” says Pauer. “Given the integration of my practice, research, and teaching.” He adds: “A few years back I had planned my doctoral dissertation as a stepping stone toward achieving particular mid and long-term objectives; (a) to develop an original didactic-pedagogical approach to an emerging academic field at the intersections of architecture, geography, politology, and media as well as (b) to develop a business plan-like framework for a non-profit investigative practice and think-tank. So my think-tank’s upcoming research-based debut exhibition is another outcome informed by this integrated approach to academic practice.” 

On March 6, Pauer will open the exhibition “How to Steal a Country,” which will transform the Larry Wayne Richards Gallery into scenes from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Scale- and life-size dioramas, vignettes and tableaus will create an immersive experience, revealing the key role architecture plays in the ongoing sovereignty dispute. A corresponding public lecture, “Recognizing Facts on the Ground,” will take place on March 14. 

Two Daniels Faculty landscape architecture professors are among the recipients of 2024 CELA Awards, given out by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture for excellence in teaching, research, creativity and design innovation.

Associate Professor Alissa North (pictured above at left) has won this year’s senior-level Award of Excellence in Research or Creative Work, while Associate Professor Liat Margolis (pictured above at right) has been recognized with the award for Outstanding Administrator.

The CELA Awards are an annual program administered by the Council’s Awards Committee and overseen by its Board of Directors. This year’s 13 winners were chosen from among nearly five dozen competitors for 2024 faculty and student prizes, according to the Council.

The editor or co-editor of numerous publications, including last year’s Innate Terrain: Canadian Landscape Architecture, North teaches graduate design studio, visual communication and history and theory courses at the Faculty.

She is the co-founder with Peter North of North Design Office, which won a 2023 Toronto Urban Design Award in the category of Small Open Spaces for its Stackt Market project.

Margolis, who was the Faculty’s Associate Dean of Research and directed the Master of Landscape Architecture program from 2017 to 2022, has been leading the Green Roof Innovation Testing Laboratory (or GRIT Lab) for the past 14 years.

Based at the Daniels Faculty, GRIT Lab is an internationally renowned research facility dedicated to research and training in living green infrastructure. 

According to CELA, the awards “serve to not only recognize these individuals, but also to inspire us, elevate our standards, and build this growing community of educators.”

This year’s recipients will be honoured on March 22 at an awards dinner and reception in St. Louis, Missouri. The ceremony will be held during CELA’s 2024 annual conference, entitled Taking Action: Making Change. The conference will take place March 20 to 23.  

Two practices spearheaded by members of the Daniels Faculty—Lateral Office and Ja Architecture Studio—have been awarded 2023 Canadian Architect Awards of Merit.

A Toronto-based platform for new spatial environments, Lateral Office is co-led (with Lola Sheppard) by Professor Mason White, Director of the Faculty’s Master of Urban Design and Post-Professional programs. The practice was recognized, with Verne Reimer Architecture Inc., for the Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, a multipurpose community centre in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.

Also based in Toronto, Ja Architecture Studio was co-founded (with architect and alumnus Nima Javidi) by Assistant Professor Behnaz Assadi. Ja was recognized by Canadian Architect for The Parti Wall, a multigenerational residential project proposed for a narrow lot in downtown Toronto.

Opened officially on November 30, the ICWH (pictured above and below) unites counselling services, a daycare, a wellness research centre, a research library and food-preparation and gathering spaces in a single, 883-square-metre facility.

Characterized by lightweight materials and panelized components, “the building utilizes the practical modular building techniques necessary for the North, but introduces colour and setbacks to the massing to make a building that will stand out and welcome the community,” as architect and urban strategist Michael Heeney, one of the awards jurors, put it.

“The building section, with its clerestory central atrium, pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved in Northern public buildings.”

Architect and urbanist Claire Weisz, another juror, was equally impressed. “This building does so much with a very constrained set of design moves. It uses straightforward means to prevent environmental damage and mitigate strong winds for the users, and [it] improves local conditions for passersby. Its bright yellow ramps and entrance walls can be seen in lower light conditions, and set the stage for it to connect to other community assets in this High Arctic city.”

Ja’s winning design (pictured in slideshow below) envisions the spine shared by two adjoining residences and their respective laneway suites as an armature that works with the context of its block to draw natural light deep into the homes, incorporate a range of outdoor spaces within each property...and create interior, multi-storey “nested gardens” for the two street-facing houses.

“This exploration of space and materials,” Heeney enthused, “is just the kind of thing that is good to see in small-scale residential work.”

Fellow juror Omar Gandhi, an architect celebrated for his own housing projects, added: “It is evident that the end result is the product of a highly intensive formal investigation based on spatial relationships, access to natural light, responses to climate, and relationships to the landscape.”

In total, Canadian Architect bestowed 18 Awards of Excellence and Merit for projects around the country this year. For a full list of recipients, click here.