Professor Terri Meyer Boake and her students swept the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction’s Architectural Student Design Competition taking the top three prizes in the competition with another receiving an honorable mention.
The 2021-22 competition theme asked students in Canadian schools of architecture to design a pedestrian bridge that spans two sites “to establish a meaningful connection. The bridge, by its elegance and gesture, should draw attention and be the symbol of a link between an origin and destination.”
Owen Melisek and Silas Clusiau won the first prize with their project Firebird, a vibrant orange steel bridge with delicate features (pictured above) located in Prince George, B.C. For them this project represented the danger of the perpetual forest fires due to climate change. The student team won $8000 prize and their Faculty Sponsor Terri won the $2000 prize.
[A] great steel creature [that] represents the human quest to remediate the scars that we have cut into this land and to rise from the ashes we have created
Cindy Ma and Luna Hu placed second with their design project The Grand Crossing situated in Cambridge. Third place was awarded to Jeffery Yau and Ernest Lee for their project Bridge No. 4. An Honourable Mention was given to Nadia Cheng and Jessica Chan for their project Sonder, Terri Meyer Boake served as Faculty Sponsor for all four of the projects.
Waterloo Architecture students have swept the past two competitions and been awarded top prize in the past three. Boake has prioritized this unique competition, "the only one of its kind in Canada and in the world" making entry in the competition core components of Arch 173: Building Construction 2 and Arch 570: Architecturally Exposed Structural Steel.
Read more about our architecture student winners here.