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2008 National Urban Design Awards
Special Jury Awards:
Small or Medium Community
Urban Design Award
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University of Ontario Institute of Technology (Oshawa, ON) |
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 The University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) is a bold new initiative in Ontario's post-secondary education system. As the first chartered university created in the Province in 35 years, UOIT is designed as an intellectual and social commons for the 21st century. As Ontario's first laptop-based university, the campus design catered to the integration of an extensive wireless system incorporated throughout the buildings.
The design concept was that of an academic village surrounding a landscaped outdoor quadrangle. The integration of buildings and landscape helps promote chance encounters between students, professors and researchers while enhancing the beauty of the campus. Although ultimately connected, each of the buildings, housing a separate academic discipline, were designed as separate entities. The different academic schools are separated by central atriums or winter gardens that are configured to suit the needs of each faculty and allow natural light to penetrate the interiors. Located throughout the floors of each building are a variety of small meeting areas and nooks for congregation, designed to encourage social interaction.
Jury Comments:
The design of this new campus, located in a medium scaled but growing city on the site of the existing Durham College, fuses innovative environmental technologies with an inventive reinterpretation of the traditional form of the academic quadrangle, in order to create a strong central place that is connected purposefully with the adjacent natural landscape and to the surrounding suburban community.
The jury perceived the strength of this project, in its edge-of-city setting, as a potential catalyst and as an exemplary, sustainable prototype for the future expansion of the university and, ultimately, for the host community itself. The planning, design and engineering of the campus exhibit a profound commitment to sustainability. “The commons” quadrangle, besides covering the nation’s largest borehole thermal energy storage system, provides a focal meeting point for the campus at a very human scale. It is defined and reinforced by the robust, well designed brick architecture of the modular teaching buildings, punctuated by the more expressive screened and glass-fronted library wing and framed by a colonnade, all overlaid by an impressively comprehensive, sustainable landscape strategy culminating in a protected wetland and the adjacent ravine.
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