Ottawa, ON – The Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC) announces the winner of its Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award. This award is given to a student project that demonstrates leadership, innovation, and a creative vision for the future of sustainable design in green buildings and communities.
Jonah Wright, a recent civil engineering graduate from the University of Victoria, won for his housing affordability project, “Revising Building Practices via Research, Mapping and Site-Specific Design: A Response to the BC Housing Crisis.” Wright received $2,000 as the winner.
The inspiration for Wright’s project came after he learned that a leading contributor to project failure was miscommunication between project stakeholders, with information and understanding often lost due to siloed thinking. Additionally, when it comes to making significant changes in housing affordability, the responsibility falls on the policymakers.
Wright’s project proposed an alternative building design methodology in which designers and engineers can implement direct responses to the housing crisis through smart, efficient, and preemptive residential design.
The project investigated the housing situation from different perspectives and explored solutions that could lead to regional and site-specific design, based on existing research and data for a redevelopment site in Vancouver. The proposed holistic design process contains many innovative components, including direct-to-issue design, integrated regional mapping, and beyond code-level site-specific design, as stated by the CaGBC.
The CaGBC adds that the motivation behind these innovations was to achieve energy performance, structural resilience, and carbon reduction in addition to economic considerations, with a cost analysis that examined material depreciation, ongoing utility rates, inflation, and the number of income earners per unit.