University of Waterloo architecture graduate Michaela MacLeod is the winner of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners. She will have the opportunity to research various design approaches taken to the reclamation of waste sites within North America and Europe. The $34,000 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners is awarded to a recent graduate of one of Canada’s ten accredited schools of architecture, who demonstrates exceptional potential. The prize winner is given the opportunity to visit exceptional buildings across the world, and to intern at an architecture firm of international stature.

Over the next year, Ms. MacLeod will investigate abused, neglected and contaminated waste spaces formed as a byproduct of industrialization within urban areas. She will examine how these spaces can be used as a catalyst for regeneration of the public realm. She will specifically focus on how ecological processes can be used as an open-ended design foundation for restoring these sites.

She will complete an internship in the office of Michael Van Valkenburg Associates Inc. This firm’s approach to design reflects her own vision, where “…architecture entails working closely with the site itself: the complex, existing, multi-layered place that has been shaped through an entire history of natural and cultural processes.” Ms. MacLeod will be asked to work on the development of ongoing building projects through physical models and drawings.

She hopes the research will culminate with a presentation at a symposium focused on the future of wastelands in Canada, organized by Ms. Macleod herself. Three themes would be explored. The first is Groundwork, Identifying contaminated sites with potential for change in Canada; the second is Initial Propagation, International inventory of reclamation projects of perceived waste sites; and the last one is Self-Organization, Canadian responses to reclamation in their infancy.

Ms. MacLeod was selected by an assessment committee consisting of architect Keith Graham of Fox Point, Nova Scotia; architectural historian Réjean Legault of Montreal; architecture journalist Maria Cook of Ottawa; architect Herbert Enns of Winnipeg and the Vancouver-based architect Vicky Brown.

The committee saluted Ms. MacLeod’s interest in using ecological processes as an active agent in the design of landscapes, leaving the final shape of the design open to these outside forces. They agreed that this profoundly understated approach to design stands at the forefront of contemporary research, and that the first experiments in that direction need to be seen in the flesh. They trusted that Ms. MacLeod had the capacity to learn a great deal from her proposed travels, and the design skills to put this knowledge to profit. Most of all, they felt that Ms. MacLeod had the willingness and the charisma to share her discoveries with others and attempt to make a positive change in Canadian site remediation practices.