Images courtesy Holcim Foundation

Winner of a $25,000 Bronze prize at this year's Holcim Foundation awards, the Living with Lakes Centre for Applied Research in Environmental Restoration and Sustainability will be situated at Lake Ramsey, the natural drinking water reservoir of Sudbury, Ont. (See rendering below.) The facility will not only be built for a minimal ecological footprint and self-reliance in energy and heat supply, but it will also contribute to the restoration of the local ecosystem, with an emphasis on guaranteeing drinking water quality and quantity.

A Sudbury, Ont., freshwater research facility has taken third place in a continent-wide sustainability competition. Announced during an October 16 ceremony in Montreal, the Living with Lakes Centre won 'Bronze' at the Holcim Foundation Awards for Sustainable Construction, which pays tribute to designs that will lead to significant technological, environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impacts.

Designed by Vancouver's Peter Busby (Busby Perkins+Will) and Sudbury's Jeffrey Laberge (J.L. Richards & Associates), the lake restoration/research facility is being overseen by Laurentian University's John Gunn. The water-quality facility will be self-sufficient for electrical/heating needs, and is aiming for Platinum in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program.

Holcim's 'Gold' prize went to the Solar 2 Green Energy, Arts, and Education Center (submitted by Christopher J. Collins), which is intended to be the first New York City building to self-sufficiently produce all its energy from sustainable sources. 'Silver' was claimed by Liz Ogbu (Public Architecture) for her design of self-contained, day-labourer stations for San Francisco, Calif.

Chosen by an international jury, the awards also included a category for the visions of young designers. Winners were:
• first place: MIT architect Neri Oxman and University of Michigan engineer John Hart for building skin research using carbon nanotubes to develop materials that can be assigned specific structural, functional, and environmental properties;
• second place: Beijing architects Chenlong Wang and Lingchen Liu for a Toronto-based urban residential densification project; and
• third place: Harvard Graduate School of Design student Andrew Lantz for his proposed urban fitness, cultural, and housing centre that obtains its power from kinetics (e.g. running on a treadmill).

Further, Acknowledgement Prizes for innovation went to:
• Evergreen Brick Works heritage site revitalization in Toronto (David Stonehouse, urban planner);
• minimal-impact North Vancouver outdoor school (Larry McFarland Architects); and
• environmentally-responsible beehive integration for Detroit, Michigan (Stéphane Orsolini and Erika Mayr of Berlin, Germany).
The gold, silver, and bronze winners of the North American competition will join a shortlist of projects from around the world for the global Holcim Awards to be held in Lucerne, Switzerland, in May 2009. For more information, visit www.holcimawards.org.