Congratulations to Christina Vogiatzis, who received the Energy + Design Award for her project The Arctic Workshop. Fibreglass Canada and architect Joe Somfay have made available an annual award, presented to an Architecture student who submits the best energy-related design.
The Arctic Workshop is a trades-based post-secondary school and research centre serving the Inuit community in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec. The building is designed as a kind of ‘testing ground’ for many innovative passive design and renewable energy strategies which alleviate the immense heating, cooling, maintenance, and operating costs inherent in the harsh Canadian North. Solar orientation, integrated seasonal shading, natural ventilation, and programmatically-informed materiality choices work to create a comfortable indoor environment that satisfies a gradient of thermal requirements for each space. Renewable energy is harvested by an array of solar panels on the building’s south façade, roof-integrated wind turbines oriented to capture the prevailing north-south winds, and a biomass boiler which converts the excess sawdust produced in the workshop to heat energy and electricity to power the building.
