2024 Brownie Award winners announced

The winners of the 2024 Brownie Awards were announced at a ceremony at the Delta Hotel in Toronto on Monday, November 18. Established in 2001 by the Canadian Urban Institute to celebrate excellence in the remediation and redevelopment of brownfield sites across Canada, the awards are adjudicated and presented annually by the Canadian Brownfields Network in partnership with Actual Media. This year marked the 25th anniversary of the Brownie Awards.

This year’s awards recognized projects and persons across eight categories, including REPROGRAM, REMEDIATE (Sustainable Remediation), REMEDIATE (Technological Innovation), RESTRATEGIZE, REBUILD, RENEW, REFOCUS, BROWNFIELDER OF THE YEAR, as well as a 25TH Anniversary Special Edition Award for outstanding achievement in Brownfield advancement, best small project, best large project, and best overall project. Of the 12 Brownie award winners, four were for Ontario-based projects or people, and one was for a project in Toronto. The Toronto-based project winner is as follows. 

The Wonder Condos project was recognized with a Brownie award in the category of project development at the building scale (REBUILD) for its transformation of the moderately contaminated site of the former Weston Bakery factory for residential uses. The project retained and adaptively reused as a base, a mix of one to four-storey factory buildings built between 1920 and 1929 (and modified sporadically in subsequent years) into an eight-storey mixed-use housing complex containing 285 residential units. The U-shaped base of the development is formed by retained Edwardian brick factory buildings on the site along Eastern Avenue that are adaptively reused for retail at grade and loft units above. New construction on the site is set back behind and above the retained factory buildings. The building wings along Logan and Booth Avenues help create an interior courtyard and accommodate two-storey townhouses. A two-level underground garage provides vehicular parking for the building and the broader area. A rooftop terrace provides amenity space on the eighth floor of the development.

Team members for the Wonder Condos included Diamond Schmitt, GBCA, Graywood, Alterra, and Entuitive.

 For more information about the 25th annual Brownie Awards or to read more about all the nominated and winning projects, please visit the Brownie Awards website here. For information on the GTHA-based Brownie Award-winning projects, please see the Wednesday, November 20 issue of Novae Res Urbis GTHA.

Source: www.brownieawards.ca