Three teams from the University of Waterloo have swept the podium at a national student design competition, taking all three top prizes for their creative use of exposed structural steel.
James Miller and Luke Carone earned the Award of Excellence — the competition's top honour — for their project Resonance. Yuxuan Peng and Jiachen Li placed second with Thirteen Ascents, and Jai Singh and Carissa Perrella took third with UBC Tropical Conservatory. All three projects were recognized in the 2025-2026 Architectural Student Design Competition, hosted by the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction (CISC).
Miller, Carone, Peng and Li are students in the School of Architecture, supervised by Professor Terri Meyer Boake, a specialist in architecturally exposed structural steel whose students have placed among the competition's top finishers in past years. Singh and Perrella are students in the Architectural Engineering program, offered jointly by the School of Architecture and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and were supervised by Professor Cory Zurell.
Now in its 25th year, the CISC competition challenges architecture and engineering students from across Canada to design with exposed structural steel; this year's jury singled out Resonance for its light touch on an ambitious scale, Thirteen Ascents for its handling of light and shadow along a suspended walkway, and UBC Tropical Conservatory for its interplay of structure and greenery.
Go to Resonance, Thirteen Ascents and UBC Tropical Conservatory for more on each project, and see the full list of 2025-2026 CISC winners for competition details.
Listing and feature image: A rendering of Resonance, the Award of Excellence-winning design by Waterloo students James Miller and Luke Carone, which evokes the movement of seabirds along the coast for this year's CISC Architectural Student Design Competition (Canadian Institute of Steel Construction).
