The McEwen School of Architecture has announced the winners of the Sudbury2050 Urban Design Ideas Competition.
The designs varied widely in their approach and their design solutions. All of them represented creative and often provocative thinking about the City of Greater Sudbury and its future, said the architecture school. Each presented a different story about the city.
Rarely does a community get the opportunity to be the focus of an international design competition, said a press release.
The winner of the $50,000 Open Category top prize was the Montreal-based design collective Collectif Escargo, made up of designers Karyna St-Pierre, Julie Parenteau, Émilie Labrousse and Pierre-Yves Diehl.
Their winning design, entitled Sève (sap), envisions a downtown core bursting with growth, greenspace, flowing water and glass.
Check out the video submission that accompanied Collectif Escargo’s entry below to see what we mean.
SEVE_Sudbury2050-video_0322 from Collectif Escargo on Vimeo.
Jury member Lisa Rochon, journalist for the Globe and Mail, architecture critic and author, and founder of CityLab in Toronto, was impressed with the design.
“An elegant and sophisticated handling of a revitalized city, deftly imagined at an urban scale that heightens community within Sudbury,” Rochon wrote. “At all levels, from regional connections to fine urban grain, the scheme shows the promise of revitalized laneways, and suave connections between timber frame commercial spaces and innovative, rewilded commons or public spaces. The team integrates nature, culture and heritage seamlessly, as envisioned by its Francophone team of designers…”
The $10,000 prize in the Student Category went to Aidan Lucas and Maeve Macdonald of Canada for their design Restitched.
Ward 9 Coun. Deb McIntosh, one of the judges, said the design creates “a new tapestry” that reimagines.
“Re-stitched tugs at the loose threads of where we’ve been and enables us to imagine where we can go,” McIntosh said. “This submission embraces who and what we are and then re-stitches the pieces to create a new tapestry that re-imagines an urban core as a destination for everyone.”
The competition jury developed a short list of the top five in the Student Category and the top eight in the Open Category. All of these shortlisted teams made public presentations online, on Nov. 23 and Nov. 24.
Following these presentations, the competition's jury made its final selections. The public was also invited to vote for their choice, with more than 2,000 votes cast online.
