Winners of the 2023 Murray & Murray Competition
September 15, 2023
The 20th edition of the Murray & Murray Competition attracted about 300 entries from students across the school on the theme of climate.
The jury selected three Murray & Murray Prize winners and three Honour Award recipients. They received a total of $6,000 in cash prizes.
“I had no idea of the extraordinary work that could magically appear in the course of a week,” said Director Anne Bordeleau. “I was very impressed by everything that you were able to put together.”
See the winners, images, and jury comments below.
The Murray & Murray Competition is a seven-day drawing competition that takes place in the first week of the Fall Term and celebrates the start of a new school year.
Tim Murray, the retired Ottawa architect who endowed the prize in 2003, was part of the jury and attended the awards presentation on September 13 in The Pit at the Architecture Building.
“I thought climate was a very apt choice for the subject for the contest this year,” he said. “Mother Earth is suffering badly, and mankind and womankind are highly dependent on people of your calibre to put things as right as you can.”
Dr. Bordeleau launched the competition on September 6, inviting students to engage with climate through their drawings, foregrounding ways in which design and the discipline of architecture intersect with these critical environmental changes.
“As we collectively take responsibility to address the climate emergency, the 2023 Murray & Murray competition likewise asks: how do we address, or apprehend, climate and the climate crisis? How do we face and work with this change?”
Out of about 300 entries, faculty and staff members chose 37 finalists for consideration by the following jury members.
- Menna Agha, assistant professor, ASAU
- Lisa Moffitt, associate professor, ASAU
- Johan Voordouw, associate professor, ASAU
- Tim Murray, retired Ottawa architect
- Cassandra Moriartey, undergraduate administrator, ASAU
- Rehab Salama, Ottawa intern architect
- Karen Lindkvist, Ottawa architect and urban planner
The event concluded with a lecture by Associate Professor Lisa Moffitt on her new book, Architecture’s Model Environments.
A video featuring some highlights of the day can be viewed here.
First Prize ($2,000)
C.J. Dopheide, 4th year BAS (Design)
Second Prize ($1,500)
Katie Stuart-Kiss, 1st year BAS (Conservation & Sustainability)
Third Prize ($1,000)
Alejandra Leon de Gante, MArch, thesis year
Honour Award #1 ($500)
Lillian Gao, 4th year BAS (Design)
Honour Award #2 ($500)
Achilla Hamilton 2nd year BAS (Design)
Jury Comments: It’s a very simple and very beautiful and readable drawing. It’s basically a chart and a map. But the simplicity tells a very strong history about how glacial levels affect the globe and rising sea levels. It depicts the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland being totally iced in the fjord in 1851, and now the fjord now is more or less ice-free. It depicts the rising temperature and how temperature has been fluctuating around zero and that the temperature of the last 50 years has just been rising and rising.
Honour Award #3 ($500)
Martha Woolfrey, 4th year BAS (Design)
Jury Comments: What we all appreciated about the drawing is what’s revealed upon further scrutiny. There are many layers of information. It’s also a story of intergenerational living in a vulnerable coastal community. There are meteorological and maybe bathymetric maps and beautiful hand-drawn figures. It’s the layering of these drawing techniques that gives meaning to the drawing.
The Murray and Murray prize has been awarded at the ASAU since 2003. According to the original terms of the prize: “The competition challenges students to develop and present an architectural idea through hand-drawn drawing and to demonstrate an exceptional ability in using scaled and rendered drawings that include the conventions of plan, section, and elevation.”