Architects and industry professionals at the forefront of wood design in Ontario came together to celebrate excellence in wood design at the 18th annual Wood WORKS! Awards night in Toronto on November 20, 2018.  The awards program honours people and organizations that, through design excellence, advocacy, and innovation, are advancing the use of wood in all types of construction.

Shane and Betsy were honoured to receive the 2018 Designer Award for their work championing wood in practice and academia. They started their practice with a focus on digital fabrication, working in wood because it was not only a beautiful material, but also cheap, light, and machinable. The year they won their first Wood Works Award for the House in Frogs Hollow, the ceremony was held in Ottawa, and it was there meeting with members of parliament and communities from the north involved in forestry stewardship, industry and design that they understood the importance of this natural resource to Ontario’s economy.

As architects they have not yet exhausted the ways in which wood can be used both in fabrication technology and in architectural design and will continue to use design leadership in practice and in academia to keep design excellence in wood at the forefront of practice.

“Canadian Interiors’ Best of Canada Design Competition is the country’s only design competition to focus on interior design projects and products without regard to size, budget or location. We welcome submissions from interior designers, architects, interior architects, decorators, and crafts persons.

Having reached the ripe age of 21 means Best of Canada is old enough to drink everywhere, and in some ways we would love to take all the winners out for a pint to celebrate their accomplishment. In fact we’d love to take every entrant out for a drink — after all, to step in the ring and present your work to be judged is a brave act and one to be commended — but clearly with such a strong year of submission totals once again it would mean a bar tab that would rival Norm’s from Cheers.”

We’ll call you on that drink and start a tab for our clients and builder too! Congratulations to the entire Ancaster Creek team.

We were surprised last Friday evening at the OAA Awards Ceremony to receive the 2018 Michael V. and Wanda Plachta Award. The prize honors architectural excellence for projects in Ontario that cost no more than 8 million dollars. This annual award was established in 1991 by Mrs. Wanda Plachta in honour of her late husband, Michael Plachta’s wish to recognize younger firms that create excellence in smaller projects.

The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) recognizes outstanding built works of architecture that acknowledge the altered circumstances of the human condition in our contemporary age. Honoring projects that consider how we might elevate the quality of our built environments by extending our interests beyond the proverbial four walls, the MCHAP process examines the many excellent works realized in the Americas as recommended by an international and interdisciplinary group of nominators.

We are thrilled with this nomination, not only as the architects, but also for the clients (Binh and Michael) and builder (David Bernstein) who together form the team that makes a project like this come to life. After reviewing the nominations, an incredible set of buildings across the Americas, it is clear that Canada is under represented. Given what the rest of the Americas is showing as their best, we can easily think of another two dozen beautifully constructed projects across Canada that have been built with innovative design and forward thinking clients. I don’t know if we are short on nominators up north or if it is our natural modesty coming into play. This is something to work on after this cycle is complete. For now, here are the nominated projects.

The House on Ancaster Creek has been named a winner of an Award of Excellence from the Ontario Association of Architects. The Awards of Excellence recognize the innovative skills of Ontario architects in creating spaces, buildings, and communities that respect and enhance the environment and enrich human activity.

“Every year it is a privilege to honour the very best in Canadian architecture and design. The OAA Awards help to champion and encourage a new standard of excellence every year and 2018 has been no exception, “said John Stephenson, OAA President. “Every project submitted for the awards has showcased how architects continue to help build and strengthen communities around the world and is a testament to the strength of our industry.”

Award recipients will be honoured at the Celebration of Excellence Awards Ceremony at the 2018 OAA Annual Conference in May.

Architects, engineers, developers and other construction industry professionals at the forefront of wood design in Ontario came together to celebrate excellence in wood design at the 17th annual Wood WORKS! Awards night in Toronto on November 2, 2017.  The awards program honours people and organizations that, through design excellence, advocacy, and innovation, are advancing the use of wood in all types of construction.

“It is our privilege to celebrate Ontario’s wood design leaders through the Wood Design Award program,” said Marianne Berube, executive director of the Ontario Wood WORKS! program. “Wood is an extraordinary building material, as you can see from the projects that received awards tonight.  It is also a sustainable building solution. Design professionals who understand the need for sustainable development are specifying wood products for innovative, environmentally responsible construction.  Some of those leaders were recognized tonight.”

Ontario Wood WORKS! presented 12 awards at the event. Ten awards went to specific wood projects and two were given to professionals for contributions to the building industry that advance the case for wood design and construction. Please CLICK HERE for the complete list of award winners.

The Exchange Brewery has received a 2016 Canadian Interiors Best of Canada Award in the retail category.

Canadian Interiors’ annual Best of Canada Design Competition is the country’s only design competition to focus on interior design projects and products without regard to size, budget or location. Categories for project submissions include: exhibit; hospitality; institutional; marketing; office; residential; and retail. For the past nineteen years, a distinguished industry panel of jurors have awarded exceptional interior design projects, as well as uniquely design products, the prestigious Best of Canada award.

This year’s jury, which included Sue Bennett,  Johnson Chou; Scot Laughton, and Jeremy Vandermeij, vetted 316 entries. An award ceremony will be held on November 30, 2016 at IIDEXCanada.

Betsy Williamson has been elected to the College of Fellows of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. The RAIC bestows Fellowship in recognition of outstanding achievement. Criteria include design excellence, exceptional scholarly contribution or distinguished service to the profession or the community.

Representing Canada coast-to-coast, the 41 new Fellows come from Charlottetown, Pokemouche, St. John’s, Dartmouth, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Sherwood Park, Calgary, Burnaby and Vancouver.

Fellows will be inducted at the College of Fellows Convocation, which takes place during the RAIC’s Festival of Architecture in Nanaimo, BC, June 8 to 11.

The Architects’ Journal, a leading architectural publication in Britain, has revealed the finalists for both the 2015 Woman Architect of the Year and the Emerging Woman Architect of the Year Awards. Ten up-and-coming stars have made it onto the shortlist for the AJ’s fourth Emerging Woman Architect of the Year Award. Betsy Williamson is the only woman from North America on the list.

The winner will be announced at the Women in Architecture Awards Luncheon on Friday, February 27, 2015, at Claridge’s in London. Phyllis Lambert will be speaking at the ceremony along with Sheila O’Donnell from O’Donnell + Tuomey. The winners of the Ada Huxtable Prize and the Jane Drew Prize will also be celebrated at the event.

Emerging Woman Architect of the Year 2015 shortlist:

Laura Highton, architect, Purcell
Jillian Jones, team leader, DRDH Architects
Sally Lewis, founding director, Stitch
Katy Marks, director, Citizen Design Bureau
Marta Pelegrin, co-director, Mediamundo Arcquitectos
Chloe Phelps, deputy team leader, placemaking team, Croydon Council
Tatiana von Preussen, Catherine Pease, and Jessica Reynolds, founders, vPPR
Betsy Williamson, partner, Williamson Chong Architects

The jury for this award is significant. Of the fourteen jury members, the following names are just a few that stand out: Norman Foster and Eva Jiricna are internationally known practitioners. Martha Thorne is the executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Laura Lee is the chief executive of Maggie’s Centres. Moira Gemmill is the design director of the V&A Museum and Christine Murray is the editor of the Architects’ Journal.

Williamson Chong is honoured to be the recipient of the 2014 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) Emerging Architectural Practice Award. This award is to recognize the principals of an emerging architectural practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture. The award recognizes the achievements of the principals for the quality of their built work, service to their clients, innovations in practice and public recognition. Donald, Betsy, and Shane will be in attendance at the Presidents’ Dinner & Awards Gala  at the forthcoming RAIC Festival of Architecture in Winnipeg on May 30th.

Williamson Chong is honoured to have been selected by the Architecture League for it’s Emerging Voices Award.

Each year the League selects eight emerging practitioners through a juried, invited portfolio competition. The Emerging Voices award spotlights individuals and firms based in the United States, Canada, or Mexico with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urbanism. The jury reviews significant bodies of realized work and considers accomplishments within the design and academic communities. The work of each Emerging Voice represents the best of its kind, and addresses larger issues within architecture, landscape, and the built environment.

Being named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League is one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture, and the program is notable for its thirty-year history of identifying and nurturing firms that go on to have influential practices. For a complete list of past winners, click here.

This year’s jury included Fred Bernstein, Paul Lewis, Kate Orff, Thomas Phifer, Annabelle Selldorf, and Adam Yarinsky. Emerging Voices is organized by League Program Director Anne Rieselbach.

The 2014 Emerging Voices are:

David Benjamin, The Living, New York City
James Lord, Roderick Wyllie, Geoff di Girolamo, Surfacedesign, San Francisco
Joyce Hwang, Ants of the Prairie, Buffalo
Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Rael San Fratello Architects, Oakland
Mauricio Rocha, Gabriela Carrillo, TALLER l MauricioRocha+GabrielaCarrillo, Mexico City
Betsy Williamson, Shane Williamson, Donald Chong, Williamson Chong, Toronto
Basar Girit, Aleksey Lukyanov-Cherny, Westley Rozen, Brad Samuels, Situ Studio, Brooklyn
Salvador Macías Corona, Magui Peredo Arenas, Estudio Macías Peredo, Guadalajara

The Architectural League organizes a number of competitions each year to nurture excellence, particularly among younger designers, and to explore ideas of topical note. Each year the League runs two prestigious programs for early and mid-career architects and designers: Emerging Voices, an invited competition for North American firms and individuals with distinct design voices and significant bodies of realized work; and the Architectural League Prize, a juried portfolio competition organized around a yearly theme for young architects and designers ten years or less out of school.

Betsy and Shane Williamson were recipients of the 2006 Architecture League Prize.

The Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture is awarded annually to an architectural firm that has completed its first built works and has demonstrated exceptional artistic potential. The prize encourages the development of artistic excellence in contemporary architectural practice by supporting the winner to travel around the world to develop their skills, their creative practice and to strengthen their position in an international architectural milieu.

Our winning proposal, titled Living Wood*, focuses upon innovative wood products and manufacturing technologies in a broad cultural context with the intent of establishing a critical relationship between sustainable buidling practices and emerging architectural design methodologies. The two-year agenda engages international architects, research institutions, and industry leaders in advanced wood construction.

We are all familiar with the economic and political importance of Canada’s export economy of soft wood lumber. New growth timber is the only major building material that grows naturally and is renewable. It is sustainable, acts as a carbon sink, and has a low energy of production. Where steel and concrete were the focus of 20th-century development in the building industry, we believe that technologically-advanced wood products will drive the next wave of innovation. Canadian architecture should be at the forefront of this work.

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) made its debut fifteen years ago in Austria and has gained traction through the green building movement ever since. This emerging industry, based primarily upon new growth timber from Europe, has been identified by the forest products industry and the research and wood design communities in Canada as a new opportunity for wood in non-traditional applications.

While recognizing that engineered wood products offer a strong combination of environmental performance and sustainability, cost-competitiveness and structural integrity, we are also interested in design opportunities afforded through the integration of emerging manufacturing technologies with both cross-laminated timber and traditional large-timber construction.

The proposed travel spans the following countries:

Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands (Precinct 1: Shared Biomes)

Switzerland and Austria (Precinct 2: Transformative Technologies)

Japan and South Korea (Precinct 3: Craft)

Bon Voyage!

* Living Wood was the title for Alvar Aalto’s design for the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris World Exposition in 1937. In the pavilion, he combined both traditional and modern architecture and showcased his functionalist design sensibilities. 

We are honoured to be included in the National Post’s “40 Under 40″ listing of fresh ideas from young Canadian designers. Along with distinguished designers in the fields of fashion, furniture, industrial design and crafts, we are happy to share this honor with our friends and colleagues, superkul inc architect.

We are honored to receive the Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement from the Canada Council for the Arts. The award is given to a candidate who is in the early stages of their career and who demonstrates both outstanding creative talent and exceptional potential in architectural design. The successful candidate must also demonstrate sensitivity to architecture’s allied arts, crafts and professions within the context of an integrated built environment. The Ronald J. Thom Award for Early Design Achievement was established in 1990, in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, by friends and colleagues of this eminent Canadian architect. The award, which honors Mr. Thom’s life and work, reflects the qualities of his legacy to Canada. This legacy includes both his buildings and the encouragement and inspiration he gave his colleagues in architecture and its allied arts and professions.

WILLIAMSONWILLIAMSON are winners in the Architectural League of New York’s 25th annual Young Architects Forum Competition. Their work, along with that of the five other winners, will be featured in a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press. An exhibition of the work will be open to the public on April 27th at the Urban Center Gallery. Shane and Betsy will lecture along with co-winners Yansong Ma and Yosuke Hayano of MAD Office at the Urban Center on the opening night of April 27th at 6:30 PM.

Founded in 1881, The Architectural League of New York is an independent forum for the presentation and discussion of creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related design disciplines. Since its inception in 1981, the Architectural League’s Young Architects Forum has provided many of the leading talents of succeeding new generations of architects and designers a valuable opportunity to present their work and ideas.