Winners of the 2025 Murray & Murray Competition

Out of about 300 entries displayed in the school, faculty and staff members chose 28 finalists for consideration by the following jury members:

Associate Professor Lisa Moffitt (jury chair)

Associate Professor Piper Bernbaum

Architect and Instructor Clinton Langevin

PhD student Julie Ivanoff

Fiona Murray, member of the Murray family

Special Programs and Communications Officer Maria Cook

The prize was endowed in 2003 by friends, family, and colleagues of Ottawa architects Tim and Pat Murray.

“This year is a bit of a transition because one of the founders of the prize passed away this summer,” said Dr. Bordeleau. “Tim Murray passed away at age 95 after an amazing, full life. So, this notion of transition was also thinking of all the things that are transitory, including life itself.”

Fiona Murray, niece of Tim and daughter of Patrick, attended the awards presentation on September 11 in The Pit at the Architecture Building. “Thank you to the students for all this amazing work you’ve put together,” she said.

Description: This work explores a space and time that is both universally experienced and frequently overlooked. The daily transition between work and home often exists in a liminal state — detached from a sense of place or presence and treated as little more than a passage from one domain to another. Although surrounded by community, this pilgrimage remains a deeply solitary and internal experience. Through completely hand-drawn imagery, The Commuter captures the fleeting and ephemeral nature of this journey. Blurred figures and stippled motion reflect the transient quality of the experience, evoking a sense of movement removed from reality.

Jury Comments: The jury was unanimous in selecting this beautiful charcoal hand drawing. It takes something simple but important, the daily commute, and records it as a personal and social event. It evokes both the sense of a crowd and the individual standing on a bus or a train. The piece illuminates the importance of these small daily transitions from home to work or school, outdoors to indoors, one part of the city to another.

Description: The crooked, overlapping shapes formed by the negative space of film strips evoke the same distortion of memory; the way it warps and fades, and even gets completely forgotten as time carries on. Those negative forms are reminiscent of the row houses in Amsterdam. Built over water, their foundations grow increasingly unsteady as the water levels rise, diminishing their structural stability as they teeter forward toward their eventual collapse. As our climate crisis intensifies in the upcoming decades, the iconic buildings and cities we revere so much may also become distant, distorted memories.

Jury Comments: The jury appreciated the colours and the questions raised by the drawing, including the film and development, and that process over time. What is in the foreground? What is in the background? The drawing speaks to how we see images, what they show us, and how they change in our minds. What we look through, what is solid, what is void, and what is revealed in our own interpretations all come out in this piece.

Description: This mixed media piece depicts the threshold between the earthly and spiritual realm. It encapsulates the feeling that many people experience when they visit a holy place. The light shining through the top window can be seen reflecting off a centrepiece, exploding in different shapes and colours.

Jury Comments: The coloration is very striking. There’s a sophisticated layering of transparency. The drawing represents the passage of light, marking the transition of time. It’s carefully and rigorously executed, and it does operate at different scales, both from a distance as well as up close.

Description: The world turns, everything shifts, and stability increasingly becomes a luxury. Putting your entire life in a suitcase to leave from crisis or towards opportunity, you tend to carry one fear with you above all. What have you lost along the way?

Jury Comments: This is a poetic and interesting drawing. It begs the question as to what permanence is. What is place, what is habitation, what do we take with us, what does it mean to exist, what is possession, what is security? The jury appreciated the movement across the page and the varying degrees of opacity, the different textures and shapes of the luggage. It asks a lot of questions about what transition means to us.

Description: The theme transition prompted me to visually convey the ramifications of urbanization in the natural environment. As a result of human activities, ecosystems gradually transition from one state to another. I thought about decay, disorder, and distress. I aimed to create a piece that blends these issues, capturing within a single page the alterations that occur in nature. I portrayed these issues at a physically inaccurate scale to emphasize their immensity, while the subtlety of man-made objects within the foliage expresses how humans often overlook the severity of pollution. This drawing took about 50 hours to make.

Jury Comments: The amount of detail and precision in this drawing is remarkable. It’s also exquisitely rendered. The most striking thing is the contrast between the built environment on the left and the natural environment on the right, and how nature is being impacted by human development. There’s quite a bit of detail. Once you look more closely, you can see how the natural world is being more impacted by development, and it’s kind of hidden within the drawing.

Description: The piece explores transition in relation to the self. Each row is meant to represent the theme differently with four condensed thumbnails, but the work centres upon an encompassing message: The world will continue to move even if you are bound. Transition is imminent and unfeeling, but resisting it will leave your life on a metaphorical ledge. Even if your stagnation provides comfort, the will of your life seeks change regardless of your control. Transition is unclear and unwritten; therefore, jump instead of slipping, dive instead of falling.

Jury Comments: This work drew our attention. It’s extremely strong on a graphic level, with a high contrast between the white lines and this gridded blue and black backdrop. This is a drawing that reads at many levels. It’s obviously a visually bold drawing, but upon closer inspection, there’s also a high level of detail in each of those blue gridded elements. The gold figure adds a nice element.

Description: Into Fire is a commentary on the current transition of our environmental context in relation to the weather. Worldwide, extreme weather phenomena are changing the ways we live. From searing heat waves to deadly monsoons, natural disasters are becoming increasingly commonplace. As you peel back the layers of the drawing — an image of a forest — a wildfire consumes the scene. I hope this piece can inspire students to think about the ways architecture must adapt in a world where the climate is volatile.

Jury Comments: This is an enticing piece that is delicately layered and interesting to look at. We found that it really captured the tension and the transition in the landscape. It’s showing a fragile moment where stillness and destruction meet. The framing of that strip of fire with the layering of the other sheets on top reminds us that transitions are not always gradual. They can be abrupt. They can be violent. The layering of text on the bottom and on the top provides good context. The author utilized great skills in drawing as well as painting, and many different media.

Description: Just as guests enjoy basking in the sun, so do Western painted turtles. The addition of a second deck, accessible by water, provides the endangered species with a space to soak up the south-facing sun. The deck allows both humans and wildlife to meet halfway between our private spaces and into a shared space.

Jury Comments: It’s an amazing drawing, very accurate and carefully drafted. It makes you think about transitions between interior and exterior, built and natural, shelter and exposure. What’s also interesting is that this drawing is a section that reminds us of the depth of the earth, land, and water — things that we don’t always see but exist and have life to them. They have ecologies. They have a history. And the precision of the section highlights thresholds that are not just architectural but also lived conditions.