Modern Office of Design + Architecture

We are honored to share that Canada Council for the Art has selected MODA as the recipient of the 2023 Prix de Rome in Architecture Prize. This Prize is awarded to a young practitioner of architecture or an architectural firm that has completed their first built works and has demonstrated exceptional artistic potential. With this prize, the recipient may travel abroad to develop their skills and their creative practice, and to strengthen their position in the international architecture world. Inspired by the Prix de Rome in architecture, which was created in the 18th century and helped young architects train in Italy, the Prix de Rome in Architecture – Professional was established in Canada in 1987 in pursuit of a more outward-looking vision towards the world. While, as a profession, we are actively exploring how contemporary concerns related to affordability, equity, diversity, inclusiveness and environmental sustainability hold the potential to reshape the ‘methods’ in which we approach design, we feel that the ‘means’ in which we construct our physical environment are often taken as a given and outside the agency of architecture. As such, we feel that this ‘blind spot’ demands further inquiry, not only with respect to the disruptive potential of robotics at the scale of architecture, but also the generational opportunity for architects to perhaps re-enter the world of ‘making’; a PAST/forward if you will to a time when architects “leveraged the benedictions of science and technology towards the betterment of society.” (quote by Reinier de Graaf - OMA) Over the next couple of weeks we will unpack PAST/forward by way of first introducing some of the problems or challenges inherent within the current paradigms of constructing our built environments, followed by various innovations or new trajectories with respect to disruptive construction technologies; namely robotic fabrication at the scale of architecture... please stay tuned!