2017 Margolese Prize winner Anne Cormier is sharing her insight on innovative, affordable design.

Montreal architect Anne Cormier is $50,000 richer after winning the 2017 Margolese National Design for Living Prize, and she’s making the great trek west to teach Vancouverites how she did it. The prize is given each year to a Canadian designer who makes exceptional contributions to the development of living environments—and not just for the crazy rich.”When you design a building it is, to some extent, for everyone,” says Cormier. She believes that besides a building’s function and interior, its conspicuous public presence is ultimately what effects everyone around it. The architect’s use of fluid and open spaces, creative design, and joyful colours have been praised by many, but her devotion to elevating her work beyond design is what takes the cake. Take her subsidized housing projects, for example. Cormier has worked on three housing projects dedicated to women in need: two for women going through social re-insertion, and one for aging women.The architect takes great pride in her work, and particularly in the joy it gives to tenants. One of her favourite anecdotes is that, one year after the construction of the first social housing project she designed for women, she ran in to one of the tenants. That tenant told her excitedly that as she was leaving her condo one day, she was asked by a passerby how much she paid for it. “He had obviously no idea that she was living in subsidized housing, ” says Cormier, “and why should he have? Housing is what constitutes most of the urban fabric. It should speak of city living for all.” Anne Cormier, 2017 Margolese Prize Winner. (Photo: Murray Paterson Marketing Group.)

Free Lecture on Creative Living Environments

Monday, March 26 (6:30 p.m.)UBC Robson Square800 Robson Street, VancouverRSVP here