Ontario: The Latest Architecture and News

Centennial College, Ontario's first public college, has collaborated with DIALOG, Smoke Architecture, and EllisDon to design and build the first zero-carbon, mass timber higher-education building in the country. Scheduled for completion in 2023, the new gateway structure will bring together Indigenous and Western cultures in both form and function.

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The ROM or The Royal Ontario Museum, an art, world culture and natural history gallery in Canada, inaugurated its newest additions, the Helga and Mike Schmidt Performance Terrace and the Reed Family Plaza. Designed by Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects (HPA), the latest add-ons create a lively space on the street level.

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Canada’s largest net-zero energy building has opened in Hamilton, Ontario. The Joyce Centre for Partnership and Innovation at Mohawk College was designed by B+H and McCallum Sather Architects to embody environmental technologies aimed at reducing the building’s carbon footprint. The Joyce Centre is one of 16 pilot projects selected by the Canada Green Building Council’s new Zero Carbon Building Standard. A net-zero footprint facility, the building was made to demonstrate Mohawk’s vision to be a center for environmental leadership.

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Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in partnership with NORR Architects & Engineers, has been selected to design the new Toronto Courthouse, to be located adjacent to Nathan Phillips Square and Toronto City Hall in the city’s downtown civic core. When finished, it will be Piano’s first competed project in Canada.

CORE Architects has revealed designs for a 60-story tower in Mississauga, Ontario, that when completed, will become the tallest building in Canada’s 6th largest city. The first of an eventual 10 towers that will make up the $1.5 billion, master-planned community of M City, the building features an undulating facade that was conceived as a continuation of the design mentality established by MAD Architects’ nearby Absolute Towers.

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Dublin-based heneghan peng Architects has won a competition to design the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. Chosen over four other shortlisted proposals, heneghan peng's winning design "embraces aboriginal wisdom to live and build lightly on the land," says the Museum, by "organically" integrating an elongated glass pavilion topped with a two-acre rooftop garden alongside the Trent-Severn waterway.

The practice will work with local firm Kearns Mancini Architects to realize the $45-million building. It is planned to rise on the city's 1904 Peterborough Lift Lock National Historic Site by 2020 and house the world's largest collection of canoes and kayaks.

According to the jury, the heneghan peng/Kearns Mancini team "stood out from the other submissions as the design works organically with the land rather than overwhelming it."

The Canadian Canoe Museum has revealed the five designs shortlisted in its competition to design a new museum on the Peterborough Lift Lock National Historic Site on the Trent-Severn Waterway in southern Ontario.

Out of 97 entered proposals, six teams were originally asked to develop more in-depth concepts over the summer, but one team withdrew. The five remaining teams -- from the United States, Canada, and Ireland -- presented their designs at an open house held by the Museum.

The Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) has commissioned Toronto firm Bortolotto to transform the university’s main office building into the Rosalie Sharp Pavilion. The office will be wrapped in a technologically-responsive layer, transforming it into a multi-use, student work and exhibition space and transforming the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets into an interactive gateway for the campus.

Six teams have been shortlisted for a chance to design the new Canadian Canoe Museum, as part of its relocation to the Parks Canada Peterborough Lift Lock National Historic Site on the Trent-Severn Waterway in southern Ontario. Selected from 90 international submissions, the competing teams are now expected to refine their ideas before presenting them to the public. A winner will be announced in the Fall.

The complete shortlist, after the break... 

According to the most recent national census in Canada, almost half of Toronto residents are immigrants, one-third of whom arrived in the past ten years. To allow the city to adapt to this surging flow of immigrants, Architecture for Humanity Toronto (AFHTO) has called upon students and professionals from various backgrounds to rethink Toronto's urban fabric - and, in particular, its high-rise developments - by establishing a series of lectures and workshops entitled "Incremental Strategies for Vertical Neighborhoods."

At the inaugural event a few weeks ago, Filipe Balestra of Urban Nouveau* was invited to speak about his work and contribute to a design charrette inspired by the City of Toronto's Tower Renewal program. For more on Balestra and the event, keep reading after the break.

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