Concept art of the rooftop garden in Nicholas Pangallo’s winning design (Photo Provided)
Two Carleton students have won recognition for their projects at Ottawa’s 2009 Urban Design Awards, which celebrate projects “built in the City of Ottawa that exhibit urban design excellence.”
Michael Tomlin, from Carleton’s School of Industrial Design, and Nicholas Pangallo, from the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, were presented with prestigious student design awards for their winning concepts.
“This is confirmation that projects that have to do with sustainability are really relevant in today’s design world,” Tomlin said.
Tomlin won for his design of a cascade public drinking fountain that services both people and pets, and makes refilling plastic containers easier. Pangallo’s award came from his “Urban Nature” design, a theoretical commercial and residential unit that would replace a parking lot sitting between Cobourg and Charlotte Streets at 560 Rideau St.
Tomlin’s fountain project was “a beautiful project organized in a concise, non-verbal way that effectively illustrates and documents the evolution of the design process,” according to the award’s judges, Canadian Architect editor Ian Chodikoff, Toronto architect Peter Clewes and Linda Anne Irvine, president-elect of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects.
“I was trying to emphasize that integral connection that we have to water, and that we have to take it as a serious resource,” Tomlin said. “By making it more aesthetically pleasing, people will be more encouraged to drink from it.”
Pangallo’s design shares this theme of melding environmental sustainability with aesthetic appeal. His Urban Nature complex is divided by a green pedestrian street and courtyard to promote the flow of people through the area. He said a public rooftop café and garden will “bring people who don’t actually live [there] into the building to experience it.”
“This is an ambitious project that packs a lot into the site,” the judges said. “This project is dynamic and pro-active; it is not afraid to make mistakes.”
The idea of the project was to “create housing for mixed demographics,” Pangallo said, “with different sized units accommodating young professionals, elders and families.”
Despite the importance of a new generation of designers focusing on environmental sustainability, Tomlin stressed the need for a design project to look good.
“If it looks good,” Tomlin said, “people are going to use it more.”