Image Post - Buchanan Courtyard Pavilion

Among the Lieutenant Governor Awards 2012 in Architecture given out last friday WMW: Public Architecture picked up an Emerging Firm Award  - very cool! A very recent awesome project of theirs is the Buchanan Courtyard Renewal at UBC done together with landscape architects Phillips Farevaag  Smallenberg. Here are more images:

All images are property of Nic Lehoux and Public

OMB and Patkau Architects win GG2012 medals

Two Vancouver architecture firms have won Canada's biennial version of Oscars for Architecture, i.e. Governor General's Medals in Architecture.

Previously profiled Linear House has garnered Patkau Architects a medal and a recent project by newly restructured OMB Architects + Designers - a technical college building in Quesnel (College of New Caledonia) - got them their first medal. The jury comment is pretty much identical to my thoughts:

"Transformed by a series of big, bold moves that celebrate basic materials, modular construction and an industrial ethos, this modest programme for a technical trades college elevates the commonplace into the heroic. Embedded within the sober, stripped-back structure, a dignified and generous set of spaces form an uplifting environment for technical education and show how apparently ordinary buildings can be elevated into truly memorable architecture."

Congratulations to the winners!

Here are more pics of the college building:

Images property of OMB

Need these in Vancouver

Do these shapes seem familiar? These are installations by Vancouver's own Patkau Architects in Comme des Garçons Ginza location, in steel this time. So Tokyo have these and Winnipeg had the bent plywood ones and Vancouver has... very few Patkau buildings, all things considered. Meanwhile we can play virtual tourists: 

And here are the precursors - the warming huts in Winnipeg:

These are so cool, modern, of "now". They would make cool public art installations even - instead we get redecorated replicas of ancient artefacts.