Announcements March 26, 2021

AIA Canada Honours Six of Our Projects with 2020 Design Awards

The awards recognize our commitment to design and sustainability

The AIA Canada Society’s annual awards program recognized six of our projects spanning architecture, urban design and interior design.

The Humber College Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation received top honours with an Award of Excellence. Both The Daphne Cockwell Health Science Complex at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Meadoway received Awards of Merit. The University of Toronto Mississauga Maanjiwe Nendamowinan and Oak Ridges Library were recognized with Citation Awards. Finally, the design of Our Toronto Studio was granted an Honorable Mention Award.

Client: Humber College

The BCTI marks Humber College’s most sustainable building to date and is one of the first Net-zero buildings of this scale in Canada.

The Humber College Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation (BCTI) sets a new stage at post-secondary institutions for innovation in automated manufacturing and human-centered solutions for the 21st Century. The moment one steps onto the Humber College campus, the BCTI presents itself as a dramatic portal, which, through its prismatic glazed lobby and gravity-defying cantilevered form, establishes a new focal point for student life. The BCTI is a flagship building for the campus to enhance Humber’s international reputation for research and innovation and promotion of collaborations with industry partners.

The Net Zero Energy and LEED Platinum design incorporates sustainability, reflecting Humber’s values. Green rooftop teaching spaces, urban agriculture pods, and a high-performance building envelope that is put on display making sustainability part of the curriculum.

The Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex arranges 300,000 sf of health sciences research, teaching, student engagement spaces, and a 330-bed residence into a vertical campus in Toronto’s core. These complex programs are interconnected by a public space system that inspires research synergies and a culture focused on wellness.

To complement its programmatic focus on health, the project also takes an ambitious approach to sustainability. At a systems level, several design features contribute to a radical reduction in the building’s overall resource consumption. It features abundant daylight and 100% fresh air through an active chilled beam system. A roof top urban farm provides an outdoor amenity for residence occupants as well as providing food to the ground floor restaurant and nutrition labs. Enhanced metering and monitoring will be used to inform future development at Toronto Metropolitan and to shape student behavior. These enhancements make the project vision – “Creating Connections for a Healthy City” – a reality.

Client: Toronto Metropolitan University

DCHSC is Toronto Metropolitan's most sustainable building and acts as a source of building performance and occupancy data for the entire campus.

Client: Toronto and Region Conservation Authority

Once complete, The Meadoway will use nature to connect Toronto’s downtown with the Don River Valley and Rouge National Urban Park.

Located within the Gatineau Hydro Corridor in Scarborough, Ontario, The Meadoway will transform 16 kilometres of highly maintained monoculture into one of the largest urban, linear greenspaces in Canada. Once complete, it will connect Toronto’s downtown with the Don River Valley and Rouge National Park. It will serve as a blueprint for revitalization, a world-class example of active, linear greenspace, and a precedent for future hydro corridor restoration.

Read more about The Meadoway

Maanjiwe nendamowinan is the second phase of a three-phase project to replace the campus’ first structure, a temporary building erected in 1967. The new building transforms the campus and its culture by completing the ring of public space that encircles the campus green and providing vital public realm connections and gathering spaces.

Seen from across the green, the architecture expresses the coming together of diverse influences and celebrates the unique theatre of campus life. A singular public space, the North Hall supports student life and learning and research environments on a daily basis, while providing much-needed event space.

Client: University of Toronto

Maanjiwe nendamowinan is the Anishnabe term for “a meeting of minds”. Appropriately, the driving theme behind the design is the convergence of a diverse set of users and academic disciplines.

Client: Oak Ridges Library

The building is inspired by the Oak Ridges Moraine which runs through this zone of the City.

Oak Ridges, a former cottage community with rich natural landscape, is an evolving neighbourhood immediately north of Richmond Hill’s rapidly growing downtown. Undersized and camouflaged within a commercial strip mall, the existing branch failed to represent the character of its community and lacked visibility into the library’s important civic function and vital role in city building.

Carefully woven into its urban context, the new branch is distinguished through generous glazing which puts the vibrant functions of the library on display and reclaims its prominent location along Yonge Street. Transparency into the branch illuminates the importance of the library’s role as much more than a passive warehouse for storing books. The branch is an active community hub and encourages collaborative learning, creative exploration, and social exchange.

Developed for Perkins&Will Toronto Studio, this project was conceived as a transformation not only of a workplace, but of a design environment and culture.

Our move from a previous mid-town location was driven by three goals: to improve access and opportunities for active transport for employees, prospective employees and clients; to strengthen the studio’s connection to the design culture of the city; and to ‘walk the talk’ within a physical environment that embodied sustainable, forward-thinking design excellence.

The resulting studio is a living laboratory that fuels design innovation and excellence while prioritizing wellness, inclusivity and sustainability – meeting our programmatic needs while embodying our most important ideas and values.

AIA Canada Honours Six of Our Projects with 2020 Design Awards

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