The Canadian Competitions Catalogue (CCC), a free online public resource, reached a major milestone in February 2019. More than 5,000 projects, documenting over 180 competitions, are now digitally archived in the CCC.
To illustrate the current extent of the archive, imagine you wanted to review all the projects in one sitting and dedicated only five minutes per project: it would take you three weeks to browse through the entire database.
A map of competitions across Canada. Image via CCC.
The Canadian Competitions Catalogue is the digital and bilingual repository for architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture competitions in Canada. A non-profit endeavour, the CCC was created in 2002 by researchers at the LEAP (Laboratoire d?étude de l?architecture potentielle: www.leap-architecture.org) in order to facilitate comparative studies on contemporary architecture. In 2006, the CCC became accessible online, gradually becoming a true collective public resource with only a handful of equivalents worldwide. This vast library of projects currently lists 425 competitions, with half of these already documented. This corresponds to nearly 46,000 documents for projects imagined and/or realized in Canada since 1905.
The CCC is regularly updated. However, the collaboration of professional firms and competition organizers across the country is required for more frequent updates. The CCC earned national recognition from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) in 2012, w...