The Global Holcim Awards Finalist 2012 certificate was presented to Lola Sheppard by Nick Caccavella and Bill Galloway, both Senior Vice Presidents at Holcim Canada. The socio-architectural project to create an Arctic Food Network (AFN) in Canada’s high arctic territory of Nunavut is a model to overcome the dependence of the Inuit community on expensive processed food products imported from the south.

The project was already winner of the Holcim Awards Gold 2011 for North America, and was praised by the jury for bringing an overlooked issue to the table, and providing a stunning solution with an impressive value-added return on the resources invested. The entire strategy up to the design was considered exemplary for responding to the landscape, climatic and site conditions, and including purposeful interventions which are integrated without any grand gestures or expensive structures.

Sustainability, Durability, and Design: The Future of Building Envelope was co-organized by the University of Toronto Department of Civil Engineering and John H Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and Holcim Canada. The forum held on April 30, 2013 is planned to be the first in a series of Holcim & University of Toronto Sustainable Development Forums. The forum brought together more than 120 professionals from engineering, architecture, planning, development and academia to discuss how urbanization is driving development and how to address efficiency needs in both new construction and existing stocks of older buildings.

Project main author Lola Sheppard will be a member of the next Holcim Awards jury for North America in 2014. She is Partner at Lateral Office, based in Toronto, Canada, and in addition, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, ON, Canada, and Director of InfraNet Lab, a non-profit research collective, founded in 2008, which probes the spatial by-products of contemporary resource logistics.

The 4th Holcim Awards competition is currently open for entries, celebrating projects and visions that contribute to a more sustainable built environment and featuring total prize money of USD 2 million. The competition is open for projects in architecture, building and civil engineering, landscape and urban design, materials, products and construction technologies that contribute to the five “target issues” for sustainable construction. The jury will meet in July 2014 with results announced in late 2014.