2019 awards jury Joe Lobko, Cindy Wilson and Rami Bebawi
The 2019 Canadian Architect Awards of Excellence jury?Rami Bebawi of KANVA, Joe Lobko of DTAH, and Cindy Wilson of LWPAC/Intelligent City?met at a charged time: six days after a global climate strike, midway through the federal election, with ongoing political turmoil in the US and social unrest in Hong Kong.
One criterion for our awards, given to design- and construction-phase projects, is the ?demonstration of social and environmental awareness.? This year, these precepts were especially resonant. How does architecture participate?consciously or unwittingly?in larger issues"
Sustainability, the jurors were glad to see, was part of most of the entries. Many were pegged to LEED criteria, but others looked to more ambitious standards, such as Passive House. The ones that were deemed award-worthy took a comprehensive lens to environmental sustainability. For instance, the Honey Bee Research Centre in Guelph features a roof planted with pollinator gardens. A pathway that ramps up the sloping surface extends an existing ground-level trail, and takes visitors on a swooping journey similar to the flight paths of bees?an issue that the Centre aims to build awareness about.
The ATTAbotics facility, a headquarters and manufacturing facility for a Calgary-based robotics company, takes an ambitious design-for-disassembly approach. This allows for ease of maintenance and minimizes material impact over the building?s lifecyc...