Carleton student, the only Canadian wins U.S. architecture award

#CarletonUniversity, #Ottawa, #Ontario, #Americanarchitecture, #environmentally-friendly, #JustinYan, #carbonneutrality,  

Ottawa, Apr 29 (Canadian-Media): A Carleton University student, Justin Yan, the only Canadian among the ten winners, had received a prestigious award from the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment for his environmentally-friendly transformation of an Ottawa building from the early 1900s, media reports said.

Justin Yan/Facebook page

The award recognizes projects that took steps toward carbon neutrality and featured solutions to environmental issues.

"I couldn't believe it," Yan told CBC Radio's All in a Day last week.

"I had to read [the email from the institute] like three, four times."


​Yan's project consisted of redesigning a 110-year-old space on Somerset Street West, near Ottawa's City Centre building. 

Being close to the city's lumber yards, the space was initially used as a factory to produce stairs.

When it closed down, the space was used as storage "for a long time," Yan told 'All in a Day'. 

It was damaged by fire in the 1940s, but due to the Yan's transformative project, it now reportedly houses an antique store.

As part of his submission, Yan, then a first-year master's student, transformed the space into a workshop for manufacturing architectural glass.

Yan had proposed the addition of a new basement level to the building to store the high-powered glass melting furnaces.

The heat from those furnaces, said Yan would help serve to keep the entire building warm.

"A big part of the movement toward sustainable design is looking into creative ways of recovering heat and reusing water within a building [through the use of] new innovative systems," he said. 

​​One of the 30 North American architecture firms who sponsored the competition had reportedly promised a paid summer internship grant to Yan and the other winners  $2,000 US and a trip to New York to showcase their designs.

All of those firms focus on sustainable design and added,

"They're very interested in working with us, the new generation, to get us thinking about all this stuff," Yan said.​