Yves Poitras, a first-year architecture student from the Faculty of Environmental Design (EVDS), has been awarded the 2014 Dialog Scholarship in Honour of Michael Evamy. Yves is the first EVDS student to win this prestigious national award since its inception.
"We are very proud of Yves' remarkable accomplishment," says EVDS dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. "His research proposal is an excellent example of the creativity and commitment to sustainability that we encourage in our students."
DIALOG established the Michael Evamy Scholarship Foundation to honour the memory of Michael Evamy, a partner in the firm for nearly 30 years. The award provides finances to a student selected from a Canadian architecture program to undertake a specific project based on their research interests.
The selection committee chose Yves' submission, (Re)Imagining the Public Realm: Diagramming Emergent Conditions of Public Space, as the winner among proposals from students across the country.
"[The scholarship] is an important initiative for DIALOG, and one that is particularly important to me personally," says architect Donna Clare, a member of the selection committee for the award. "Supporting students in exploring ideas and concepts about architecture and the fundamental role it plays in shaping our communities and our society is vital to our future."
Yves' submission reimagines derelict, residual public spaces between structures. "These left-over spaces often come as an afterthought to the buildings they border," Yves notes, "however, they can be just as important as the physical structures themselves." Using examples of cities that have successfully incorporated residual spaces into the public realm, Yves' research proposes new opportunities for growing cities to reinvent outdoor spaces.
"Our cities are evolving: growing taller, becoming denser, offering new opportunities to create public spaces where they do not usually occur," he explains. Alternatives like off-grade public spaces, roof-top plazas, and vertically integrated communities, can help revitalize the vestige of public life on urban streets.
Yves will travel to San Francisco, Paris, Barcelona, and Copenhagen in fall 2014 to conduct his research and complete a series of diagrams that will analyze the ways that varying types of architecture can be transformed into open, accessible public spaces. "I am very excited to have won the Michael Evamy Scholarship," he says, "I have many ideas for what public spaces can do for our city and I hope to explore interesting examples of these through my travels and research."