2011 Urban Design Awards competitions

[Martin]

Every other year, seven cities across Canada hold Urban Design Awards competitions, and almost half of these cities are in the GTA: Toronto, Mississauga and Hamilton.

Winners of the municipal competitions automatically participate in the National Urban Design Awards competition, which will be held in 2012.

Toronto announced its award winners last week (see article in the Toronto Star and the report of the jury). You can see the exhibit of winners either at City Hall or the Civic Centres in September and October (see schedule).

Mississauga, which holds its Urban Design Awards competition every year, is currently reviewing nominations.

Hamilton just published its list of nominees. Even though the City of Hamilton's 2011 Urban Design Awards program is much smaller than Toronto's (36 vs. 126 submissions), there are several interesting projects. A distinctive feature of Hamilton's program is that people can vote for a People's Choice Award.

For more information on Hamilton's Urban Design program, please see below an article from raisethehammer.org.


Vote for the Urban Design and Architecture People's Choice Award

By Martin Hering
Published September 21, 2011

This fall, the City of Hamilton will be awarding its 2011 Urban Design and Architecture Awards for the fourth time - and you are invited to vote for one of these awards, the People's Choice Award.

If you want to participate, you need to cast your vote for your favourite urban design project. Please vote soon: voting closes on October 10.

The city created the biennial Urban Design competition in 2005 "to recognize and celebrate excellence in the design of our urban environment". Since the awards' emphasis is on exterior design, the nominees include not only buildings - both new structures and heritage buildings - but also a variety of other works that improve urban design, such as streetscapes, parks, and planning studies.

In past competitions, the jury gave out awards of excellence and merit in many different categories: urban design, architectural design, heritage restoration, community design, adaptive reuse, sustainable design, and a few others.

This year, there are 36 nominees for the Design Awards. All were completed between 2009 and 2011.

A few nominees are big and well known: the Lister Block, City Hall, the Public Library and Farmers' Market, the MacNab Transit Terminal, and CANMET. But there are many other nominees that are less known - or pretty much unknown - and thus worth a closer look.

Have you heard of the "Hamilton Laneway Housing Study"? Are you familiar with the "Gore Master Plan"? Have you walked across the "East Hamilton Waterfront Link"?

This year, the jury who will decide on the Design Awards includes five architects, urban designers, and urban planners: Bruce Cudmore (EDA Collaborative), Jennifer Keesmaat (DIALOG), and Stasia Bogdan (Ministry of Health and Long-term Care), as well as two representatives from the city: Paul Mallard (Director of Planning) and Tim McCabe (General Manager, Planning and Economic Development).

The judges will study presentations and photos of each project and carefully evaluate them, looking at appropriateness, building and landscape design, sustainability, quality, and innovation.

The criterion for the People's Choice Award is simple: which nominee do citizens like best? Use the opportunity to participate in the 2011 Urban Design Awards and choose your favourite project!

Full disclosure: our house - Hambly House - is one of the nominees. I'm not asking you to vote for us, I'm just asking you to get involved and vote for the nominee you like best.

 

[Martin]

City of Hamilton Urban Design and Architecture Awards - Project Descriptions

The City of Hamilton just posted project descriptions and many photos of the 36 nominees for the Urban Design and Architecture Awards.

People's Choice Award Project Descriptions Part 1 (PDF, 12 MB)
People's Choice Award Project Descriptions Part 2 (PDF, 14 MB)

 

[Martin]

Urban Design award give you a chance to vote
Mark McNeil
The Hamilton Spectator
October 3, 2011

Click here for article

Click here for map


It’s just one street in the west end of Hamilton, but over the past couple of years some very interesting construction projects have been happening at both ends of it.

At 183 Longwood Rd. S., the $100 million CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory officially opened in February to great fanfare. The building — with its 157 rooms and 145,000 square feet of space — is an important part of the McMaster Innovation Park, located on former Camco property.

Drive down the road to 170 Longwood Rd. N. and you’ll find the oddest little house in the village. It’s called Hambly House, and in a sea of Tudor-style homes, Hambly looks more like a ship. It’s a full-fledged Art Deco, Bauhaus voyage into eccentricity. It was built in 1939 and its current owner spent more than $100,000 to bring it back to former glory.

CanMet and Hambly are just two of 36 entries in this year’s Urban Design and Architecture Awards in a year that has seen a lot of interesting construction projects. And people in Hamilton have the chance to vote for their favourite projects in the People’s Choice category.

Among the entries this year, is the $72 million renovation of Hamilton City Hall that officially reopened in June.

Another entry nearby didn’t involve construction at all. It’s called Urban Sustainability — The Edible Landscape, a project that transformed City Hall gardens into vegetables instead of flowers. The harvest is going to city food banks.

Michelle Sergi, manager of community planning and design for the city, says entries come in many forms in the biennial contest. “We get a variety of submissions and they cross a variety of issues. They go from residential to commercial to industrial. There are new buildings, adaptive reuse of buildings. We also get landscapes submitted.

“It’s about recognizing excellence in design in Hamilton. The goal is to create great places or great spaces for people. Part of that is recognizing the architecture, the landscape, the urban esign that goes into the spaces.â€

 

[Martin]

City of Hamilton 2011 Urban Design and Architecture Awards: The Winners

To read the article with all links, and to comment on it, go to raisethehammer.org:
http://raisethehammer.org/article/1504


2011 Urban Design and Architecture Awards

The City created this competition 'to recognize and celebrate excellence in the design of our urban environment.' Here are the 2011 winners.


By Martin Hering
Published November 21, 2011

The City of Hamilton just released the Jury Report (PDF, 26 MB) on the 2011 Urban Design and Architecture Awards, which were held for the fourth time this past November 10.

The city created this competition, which takes place every other year, "to recognize and celebrate excellence in the design of our urban environment". This year, there were 36 submissions from owners, architects, and citizens.

The awards jury included four experts: two architects from Toronto (Stasia Bogdan, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, and Bruce Cudmore, EDA Collaborative) and two urban planners from the City of Hamilton (Tim McCabe, General Manager, Planning and Economic Development, and Paul Mallard, Director of Planning).

The jury decided to create six categories for the 2011 Urban Design and Architecture Awards: Restoration, Architecture and Sustainability, Architecture, Urban Design, Adaptive Reuse, Landscape Architecture, and Healthy Communities.

It gave out 13 awards in total. In addition, there was a People's Choice Award for the project that received the most online votes.

Below, you will find a summary of the jury's comments on the winners in each category, with links to photos and information (usually from the architects' webpages). For an overview of the names of the owners, architects, and other members of the design team, you can visit the City's webpage.

There is also a very nice map of the locations of all projects, which was created by the Hamilton Spectator.

Restoration
All jury members were highly impressed by the Lister Block, which received an Award of Outstanding Achievement and Excellence in Restoration. They noted that the Lister is also a showcase of urban design, adaptive reuse, and community renewal.

Hamilton City Hall, like the Lister Block a designated heritage property, got an Award of Merit in Restoration since "[t]he many interior features and design details of the building that give the building its architectural identity were protected during the restoration."

Our restored Hambly House received an Award of Honorable Mention from the jury.

Architecture and Sustainability
The jury was very impressed by the CANMET Materials Technology Laboratory and awarded this project the highest honor in the Architecture and Sustainability category. The jury called it a "tour-de-force of passive and active sustainable technologies".

Awards of Merit were given to St. Matthew Catholic Elementary School, which features a green roof and an outdoor classroom, and to the Learning Exchange at Mohawk College, which has a curtain wall of coloured glass that appears at night "as a lit mural of vibrant colours and shapes".

Urban Design
The Award of Excellence in Urban Design went to the Branthaven Beach House, a townhouse development on Beach Boulevard. The jury liked the public promenade which "is an inviting feature visually framed by townhouse blocks and lined by trees, painted pergolas, enhanced paving, and seating".

The jury gave an Award of Merit in Urban Design to Bridgewater Court, a New-Urbanism-style townhouse development by Hamilton City Housing, which it sees as "a successfully planned development where the automobile is not a dominate driver of the design ".

It gave another Award of Merit in Urban Design to the Good Shepherd Women's Services Centre, calling it a "successful urban design strategy that is aware and sensitive of the surrounding context". Even though the Centre is a single building, its facade gives the appearance of several buildings.

Adaptive Reuse
The jury recognized the West Avenue Residences, a 19th-century school building that was converted to affordable housing units, with an Award of Excellence in Adaptive Reuse. Even an unpleasant gymnasium addition from the 1950s was successfully incorporated into this project.

An Award of Merit in Adaptive Reuse went to St. Thomas Lofts, a red-brick church that was divided into affordable apartments.

Landscape Architecture
The jury regarded the Edible Landscape in the forecourt of City Hall as a "creative approach to landscape architecture in raising awareness about our food" and recognized it with an Award of Excellence in Landscape Architecture.

Healthy Communities
The new MacNab Transit Terminal received an Award of Merit in Healthy Communities because it provides "a well functioning and a visually pleasing high quality environment" for public transit users.

Architecture
The C Hotel By Carmen's received an Award of Merit in Architecture from the jury which noted its "variation in the form and exterior materials of the building".

People's Choice Award
The People's Choice Award, which was given to the project that received the largest number of online votes, went to the Multi-Tenant Office Building in the Ancaster Business Park.