Masonry Magazine December 1976 Page. 12
Winner of the Award of Excellence, Fire Station No. 3, Oshawa, Ontario. (Details on facing page.)
Ontario Architectural Design Awards
The architectural firm of Melvin Satok has been chosen as the recipient of the Award of Excellence for the 1976 Ontario Masons' Relations Council Unit Masonry Design Awards competition. The tribute recognized the firm's design of Fire Station No. 3 in Oshawa, Ont.
Melvin Satok, representing the architectural firm, and Alderman Alan Dewar, chairman, Fire Protection Committee, representing the corporation of the city of Oshawa, owner of the award-winning building, received their awards from the Hon. Sidney Handleman, Minister, Consumer & Commercial Relations, Ontario. The presentations were made at the Bristol Place Hotel, Rexdale, Ont., at a banquet on October 28.
The Award of Excellence and six Awards of Merit were presented to honor the design and workmanship of buildings erected in Ontario within the past four years. The judging was conducted by three well known Toronto architects: Stephen V. Irwin, James C. Strasman and George D. Gibson. Gibson has been professional advisor to the OMRC awards program since 1964. This year there were 57 buildings submitted by 37 architectural firms.
The sponsor of this competition, the Ontario Masons' Relations Council, represents a unique example of labor-management cooperation. The organization represents the Ontario Region of the Clay Brick Association of Canada, the Ontario Provincial Conference of the International Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftsmen, the Ontario Concrete Block Association, and the Ontario Masonry Contractors Association.
Report of the Jury
While the jury was unanimous and sincere in its enthusiastic comments on the award-winning buildings, it did have certain reservations about the submissions as a whole. The jury decided that:
* There was little or no indication of innovative design or use of unit masonry.
* With few exceptions the buildings submitted showed little correlation between inside and outside. But where the exterior masonry units were carried through into the interior, a three-dimensional sense of quality and continuity was generally achieved.
* In a few cases, there were outstanding examples of beauty achieved by careful selection of a range of brick or of a solid color. The jury was of the opinion, however, that architects were being hindered in the search for innovation by the unavailability of such special shapes as radius, coping, sill and paving brick. The jury added that architects could perhaps be more daring in experimenting with the use of more than one color on the facade, as was done in Victorian times.
The jury was also very interested in the reaction of the users of each particular building. The bulk of this year's submissions to the competition were institutional buildings. It appeared that where they had been conceived and designed as individual programs, the attitude of the users ranged anywhere from "happy" to "enthusiastic," and the buildings were considered to be good buildings. Where the program had been drawn up by an impersonal headquarters as a stereotype, the users were often disgruntled and critical, and the buildings were in fact considered inferior.