KANVA, an architects collective from Montreal, receives the 2015 RAIC Emerging Architectural Practice Award. This recognition highlights their previous awards in two international design competitions: the Winnipeg Warming Huts and the international Space for Life architecture to re-imagine the Montreal Biodome. A success already revealed by notorious projects such as Irène (recipient of a RAIC Innovation in Architecture award) and the Edison Residence (recipient of a Grands Prix du Design Award)

KANVA is exceptionally grateful to be recognized for consistently designing distinguished architecture, advocating innovation in their practice, offering extensive services to their clients and increasingly gaining public recognition. Upon receiving this prestigious national award, the firm is thoroughly encouraged to further develop creative and resourceful strategies to continue to maintain a meaningful practice, while beneficially contributing to the quality of the built environment and the growth of communities.

KANVA’s work elicits an experience, a memory, a reaction. The multidisciplinary collective is led by Tudor Radulescu (OAQ LEED PA MRAIC) and Rami Bebawi (OAQ MRAIC RBQ), made up of passionate architects, who act equally as artists and educators dedicated to the perpetuation of a total architecture. For this team of dynamic individuals with diverse cultural origins, total architecture is a methodology of envisioning and leading every aspect of a project from concept, to construction, to final inhabitation. Applicable to all KANVA’s endeavours,  from art installations that enliven the city to innovative turn-key solutions they provide to their clients, total architecture ensures each project carries a cohesive narrative.

Founded in 2003, KANVA demonstrates architecture’s transformative power through a range of disciplines and scales, from the ephemeral to the institutional. One of the ways Radulescu and Bebawi understand their role is as a contemporary master-builder, an artist of the built environment who considers design and construction technology as a single performative act that produces proactive architecture that addresses the contemporary complexities of culture, economy, sustainability and innovation. The collective’s vanguard work has been featured in international publications such as Azure, Canadian Architect, Architecture Mouvement Continuité, Dezeen, ArchDaily, Designboom, Phaidon Atlas and The New York Times.

KANVA would like to thank the RAIC and this year’s jury for instilling confidence and optimism in the firm, and the architectural community at large. The team believes that emerging Canadian practices highly benefit from RAIC’s mission to disseminate responsible architecture, to recognize excellence in the built environment and to contribute to the advancement of the architectural profession. Furthermore, the firm is honoured to follow in the footsteps of Williamson Chong Architects and 5468796 Architecture. This significant recognition is to be shared with the entire KANVA community, starting with their ever-precious team, clients, collaborators, peers (both academic and professional) and devoted friends and family.

If emergence means the capacity to push professional boundaries, ask critical questions and continually seek out opportunities for innovation and quality, then KANVA hopes to always be undergoing a process of emergence.

“This is a firm that is always looking to the future,” said the five-member jury that selected KANVA for the broad range and high quality of its projects.

“The firm is continually and consistently innovative,” said the jury members. “Their work has a strong experimental quality. It demonstrates experience and knowledge of construction detail and quality.”

“The kind of work we see coming out of firms who win an Emerging Architectural Practice Award exhibits ability to innovate successfully and manage risk,” said RAIC President Sam Oboh, FRAIC.

“Being innovative and evolving the scope of and approach to contemporary architectural practice in Canada is to be celebrated and recognized,” said Mr. Oboh.

The Emerging Architectural Practice Award will be presented at a ceremony at the RAIC/AAA Festival of Architecture, which takes place in Calgary June 3 to 6.

wwThe 5 RAIC jury members were Peter Busby, FRAIC, Past Gold Medalist; Paule Boutin, AP/FIRAC, RAIC Past President; Tyler Sharp, MRAIC, Past Recipient of the Young Architect Award; Siamak Hariri, FRAIC, and Martin Houle, MIRAC, founder of the architecture website kollectif.net.