Winners of the 2024 Murray & Murray Competition
September 13, 2024
The 21st edition of the Murray & Murray Competition attracted about 400 entries from students across the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism on the theme of Open City.
The jury selected three Murray & Murray Prize winners and four Honour Award recipients. They received a total of $4,800 in cash prizes.
“It’s amazing to see what comes back in response to a call that is so open to interpretation,” said Director Anne Bordeleau.
“Is it a façade or is it what’s inside? Is it about surface and depth? Is it about what’s above ground or below? Is it about what we like to see or what we close our eyes to? Is it about the political, the social, the infrastructural? All of these were opened up in different ways throughout your drawings.”
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. The competition challenges students to develop and present an architectural idea through hand-drawn or hybrid (hand-drawn and digital) drawings.
Tim Murray, the retired Ottawa architect who endowed the prize in 2003, attended the awards presentation on September 12 in The Pit at the Architecture Building.
“I’d like to congratulate all the entrants for the high standard and the very good work,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the combination of technical skills and academic thinking. I’m amazed at the ingenuity shown in the various approaches.”
Dr. Bordeleau launched the competition on September 5, inviting students to look at any city, past, present, or imagined, and to rethink it or lay its realities open for all to see.
“Open City: these two words put together might evoke welcome and spatial breadth, conjuring up urban images devoid of barriers,” said the call. “But they may also be understood as a plea to literally open the city: to make it truly accessible, public, shared, and inclusive. ”
Out of about 400 entries displayed in the school, faculty and staff members chose 32 finalists for consideration by the following jury members:
- Menna Agha, Assistant Professor, ASAU
- Zachary Colbert, Associate Professor, ASAU
- Steve MacLeod, Digital Craft Technician, ASAU
- Honorata Pienkowska-Roseman, Adjunct Professor, ASAU
- Faysal Tabbarah, Associate Professor, ASAU
- Sneha Sumanth, Intern Architect, Instructor and PhD candidate (Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University)
In addition, Fiona Murray, a member of the Murray family, visited during deliberations and assisted with the vote.
First Prize ($1,500)
Emilio Hechanova, 4th year BAS (Design)
Title: Untitled City – Future Developments – 2350.3dm.
Description: Featuring a forest of potential buildings in their schematic phase, the drawing showcases a wireframe vision for an upcoming imaginary city. It is a warning about the type of city that could be made in the future as it depicts an exponential desire for high-rise design that is driven by power and profit. The medium of the drawing combines both the computational and visually repetitive nature of a binary matrix and a wireframe view-style to present a layered, claustrophobic cityscape. It is a vision that screams for city design and experiences that are much more human.
Jury Comments: You have really opened not only the city but also your interpretation of it through the drawing that both has rules, is regimented, and yet it is extremely three-dimensional. It allows each of us to find something that we can relate to and see an aspect of the city that for us is important. Coming closer to the drawing, we find additional details. Through this incredible simplicity, we found richness in how it was both thought about and shown.
Second Prize ($1,000)
Jeffrey Liang, 2nd year BAS (Design)
Title: Cityscape of the Scope
Description: From my perspective, the openness of a city is defined by the citizens within it. This artwork follows this ideology by having each figure placed in such a way that determines the massing of the scene, while simultaneously allowing the viewer to have contextual ambiguity as to the purpose of the buildings. The city’s openness is equivalent to the freedoms of each inhabitant, and its visual nature is open to interpretation.
Jury Comments: Incredible use of black and dark spaces. There is a city. We just don’t see it, but we feel it, so we know the city is there. You center bodies and neighbours, so we see people moving, as if you’re telling us that people are who made the city.
Third Prize ($700)
Sonia Xu, 4th year BAS (Design)
Title: Xiamen, Arrival
Description: Xiamen is an island city off the coast of China. The city’s many beautiful bridges connect to the mainland and across the island itself. It has long been an important port, putting it in the unique position of having had a lot of contact with Western commerce. It was also my own landing point. This drawing speaks of my own experience arriving for the first time in my family’s hometown, but more broadly, it expresses the uncertainty and longing shared by many living in diaspora. The city opens itself to departure, to return, to discovery, to remembrance, to coming home.
Jury Comments: The jury appreciated the drawing’s technical skill, elevated with a layer of conceptual rigor that challenges to viewer to think what the drawing is about — a city transformed over time in multiple layers, overlaying on top of each other.
Honour Award ($400)
Blanche Baylosis, 2nd year BAS (Design)
Title: White Flag
Description: The theme of an open city gave me an opportunity to explore a situation where a city is forcibly torn apart. I wanted to reveal that underneath the rubble and ruins of buildings, humans are living or have lived. White Flag shows the vulnerability of a city that does not have a choice. I hope that this piece will make the unseen seen and to show that the voices that have been calling out are heard.
Jury Comments: This drawing was strikingly composed. It had a political message, beautifully pulled together. The use of different scales and different projections is something that the jury really responded to well.
Honour Award ($400)
Basil Currie, MArch, 1st year
Title: Unplanning
Description: This piece is an automatic drawing, meaning that I drew everything that came to mind as I worked. It interprets openness as an open-ended drawing process and interpretation of the piece.
Jury Comments: What we really responded to in this drawing was the extraordinarily intricate hand work. There’s a great deal of craft in the drawing as well as use of pointillism and strategic use of colour. It’s a beautiful drawing.
Honour Award ($400)
Ann-Catherine Lemonde, MArch thesis year
Title: Movement across cities in more-than-human worlds
Description: By overlaying erased waters and mapping sporadic areas of significant tree canopy, this map critically reflects on the role of planning in Montréal-Est\Tiohtià:ke. It invites viewers to speculate on what it means to open a city to more-than-human worlds. What processes of care might we engage with in our daily practices to open living corridors – spaces for connection – between the Saint-Lawrence and Prairies Rivers?
Jury Comments: Amazing, incredible work. Really good composition and use of colour. And it’s kind of the fantasy and the abstraction where we get what it means. We feel what it means.
Honour Award ($400)
Casey Pantaleon, 3rd year BAS (Design)
Title: Shoreline Developments
Description: This drawing explores the impact of shoreline development in Ottawa and raises questions about the enforcement of existing regulations. It reflects on the balance between development and environmental stewardship. To counter negative effects or urban expansion, the City of Ottawa has mandated a 30-metre setback from the shoreline. This piece invites the viewer to question whether the city will double down on its commitment to preserving these setbacks or if developers will continue to work around these rules, further encroaching upon and degrading the shoreline.
Jury Comments: We really loved this one because it was something quintessential of Ottawa. We thought that it was humorous and ironic, and the detail and the technical work was wonderful.