Ambitious student project on revising building practices wins

Winning Project Title: Revising Building Practices via Research, Mapping and Site-Specific Design: A Response to the BC Housing Crisis
Winner:  Jonah Wright, University of Victoria, British Columbia

Ottawa, ON – August 7, 2024 – The CAGBC Awards celebrate the projects, teams and individuals advancing green building in Canada. The Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award recognizes up-and-coming talents. Presented in memory of a visionary green building advocate, Andy Kesteloo, the 2024 award goes to a student project that demonstrates leadership, innovation, and a creative vision for the future of sustainable design in the field of green building and communities.

This year’s winner was Jonah Wright, a recent graduate of civil engineering from the University of Victoria, British Columbia (B.C.). Motivated to find solutions to housing affordability issues, Wright worked on his project for over two years before incorporating it into his senior year research project course.

While studying, Wright realized that a leading contributor to project failure was miscommunication between project stakeholders, with information and understanding often lost due to siloed thinking. Another lesson learned was that significant change in housing affordability is almost entirely on the shoulders of policymakers, which can be an obstacle to rapid change. These two lessons helped him define the scope of this project.

“I’ve always been interested in green building design all throughout university, so when I started looking through student work placements or co-ops during my degree, I was curious about how high-performance housing design and the housing crisis interact. With those two points in mind, I wanted something that would be holistic in application that would simplify the design process while answering the question, what would it take to reliably mandate, design and deliver a home that is affordable, risk averse, and sustainable that can be adopted now?”

Wright’s project was an attempt to propose an alternative building design methodology where designers and engineers can implement direct responses to the housing crisis though smart, efficient, and pre-emptive residential design. The project investigated the housing situation from different perspectives and explored solutions that could lead to regional and site-specific design, based on existing research and data for a redevelopment site in Vancouver. The proposed holistic design process contains many innovative components, including Direct to Issue Design, Integrated Regional Mapping, and Beyond Code Level Site Specific Design. The motivation behind these innovations was to achieve energy performance, structural resilience, and carbon reduction in addition to economic considerations, with a cost analysis that examined material depreciation, ongoing utility rates, inflation, and the number of income earners per unit. This approach was taken to ensure affordability and sustainability beyond the research project’s time of completion.

Now a graduate, Wright is looking to pursue a career in housing management, design or a related field. He hopes to continue exploring new approaches to housing and build on his student project experience to better address housing issues.