2024 Winners and honorouable mentions

Exchange, the winning entry for the City of Calgary’s Riverwalk West international design competition, is a product of a collaboration among team members representing landscape architecture, architecture, indigenous storytelling + placemaking, structural engineering, and transportation engineering. The Team demonstrates the value of inclusive, multidisciplinary design that holds design excellence above discipline.

Here today, gone tomorrow…

This sentiment resonated with our client, a small developer in Calgary, who – in their brief for a new +/- 10,000 sf mixed-use building that includes both Food & Beverage and small commercial – challenged us to conceive of a building more as an event than object in an effort to elicit a higher reciprocity or conversation between built form, flexibility, flux and transience. Despite the fact that privileging the temporary and the ephemeral provides a bridge to the immediate, understandably, this not only implicates longstanding traditions of the architectural profession, but also challenges sustainable rhetoric which cites new construction as contributing approximately 40% of the worlds carbon emissions, as such, substantiating permanence vs. impermanence as the “more responsible” design approach.

The Playbook's open space design concept centres around creating a connected and vibrant network of parks and public spaces. This network is based on three guiding philosophies: approaching every park and public realm area as part of a single, cohesive park experience, expanding the role of streets to provide recreational and social functions, and blending green, calming environments with lively, energetic spaces to offer diverse experiences throughout the neighborhood. These approaches directly respond to the award criteria by promoting place-making, enhancing amenity value, and fostering vibrancy in public spaces.

As the name SWITCH/bloc implies, our solution entailed distributing a typical unit over two floors in a switchback fashion, this allowed us to allocate the more public programmatic requirements of dwelling (kitchen, living, dining, etc.) at the front of the building and the more private programmatic requirements at the back of the building. This division of program, into an extroverted front façade and an introverted rear façade, breathes new life into Le Corbusier’s ‘Inter-locking’ unit design for his Unité d’Habitation projects, as well as expands upon the modernist epithet of ‘form follows function’ by helping to re-frame the formal language of multi-family architecture.

At 186-hectares, the park builds upon a long-standing vision of a continuous river valley park system that has continued to inspire the City of Calgary and its citizens. The key principle of the park’s design was to create a place where nature, culture, and history intersect. This is achieved through two, intersecting transects across the landscape. One interprets the site’s natural character—escarpments coulees, grasslands, seeps, and springs. A second moves across the cultural landscape of the site to reflect on the human imprint—the nomadic Blackfoot Nation, Hudson Bay fur traders, pioneering railroad workers, and the legendary cattle ranchers and farmers.

The design was driven by the limitations of the original elevated LRT station, which created significant physical and visual barriers. Commuters were required to navigate a series of stairs, ramps, escalators and Plus 15 walkways to cross Macleod Trail or access Stampede Park, making the pedestrian experience fragmented and inefficient. As one of Calgary's busiest LRT stations—serving approximately 13,000 transit customers daily—a modern and accessible design for the new Victoria Park/Stampede station was essential. The new at-grade station reduced the pedestrian access experience from 400 metres to 60 metres and offers improved accessibility for all.

Pixel Park – a pixel-powered realm in The C+E where gaming meets reality – reflects its name and identity through a vibrant, video-game themed space that incorporates playful brand elements from pixelated ground markings to video-game inspired marquee signs and sculptures, to a multi-pixel equipment lending station and Player Hub. This gamified hub creates a sense of place in The C+E, drawing design inspiration from the spirit of entertainment that resides in The District’s DNA.

The plaza redesign features structural art installations, interactive lighting, and organic shaped seating incorporated within urban street trees that create a welcoming and aesthetically pleasing environment, drawing people to relax, interact, and linger. We implemented a multidisciplinary approach to increase the size of the plaza to its maximum allowable limits (as determined by roadway limits) while enhancing safety via traffic calming for vehicles turning onto Kensington Crescent.

The Wandering Island is a site-specific, collaborative art project on Elbow Island, a park located beneath Mission Bridge in Calgary/Mohkinstsis. This park balances precariously between city + nature, land + river, public + private, camouflaged + forgotten. The Wandering Island has a mandate to create slow art for the audience of birds, bats, beaver, fish, and the occasional curious wanderer.

Bow to Bluff is a community-driven initiative that has transformed an underutilized series of open spaces along the Northwest C-train line in Calgary into a vibrant and inclusive corridor of diverse social activity. Initiated in 2011 through a community-secured grant, the project undertook a game-changing engagement process that pioneered many now common techniques such as sounding boards, community walks, a storefront, and interactive events. This process opened numerous possibilities for the area and formed a dedicated group eager to have the project realized.

This program and its associated projects use methods of tactical urbanism to engage with spaces across Calgary. While many social problems have million-dollar resolutions, this program thrives on offering communities microgrants ($1,000-$10,000) that enable citizens to pilot and test initiatives that may contribute to part of the solution. Often these modest and simple projects end up having major impacts that reignite communities, fostering new connections between neighbours, and unlocking new neighbourhood amenities and gathering spaces.

The project site’s four edges are designed to integrate with adjacent use types and building scales, through landscape transitions, activation of the building façade, and placement of program types. Along the south and east, Sam Centre connects to Enbridge Plaza and existing Youth Campus buildings. The edges are activated by the café at the southeast corner, integrated benches at the exterior walls, generous overhangs that extend toward the plaza, and landscape beds that frame 13th Avenue and 6th Street SE.

The early massing studies for this project - a two-storey 15,000 sf, mixed-use building located in Calgary’s new community of West District, includes Food + Beverage/Retail, Community Centre and Public Washroom programming – expanded upon Corbusian notions of roof garden by conceptually delaminating the landscape, such that it informed entry, procession and movement through the building.

As the name SWITCH/bloc implies, our solution entailed distributing a typical unit over two floors in a switchback fashion, this allowed us to allocate the more public programmatic requirements of dwelling (kitchen, living, dining, etc.) at the front of the building and the more private programmatic requirements at the back of the building. This division of program, into an extroverted front façade and an introverted rear façade, breathes new life into Le Corbusier’s ‘Inter-locking’ unit design for his Unité d’Habitation projects, as well as expands upon the modernist epithet of ‘form follows function’ by helping to re-frame the formal language of multi-family architecture.

Kensington Corner, located at the intersection of Kensington Road and 16 Street NW, is a small-scale, mixed-use development in Calgary’s inner-city. Designed by Hindle Architects, the project successfully integrates residential and commercial spaces within a compact footprint, creating a balanced live-work environment. This development supports broader goals of densification, sustainability, and community well-being while aligning with The City of Calgary’s urban design principles.