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It’s hard to believe that the AZ Awards is celebrating its 15th edition. It seems like only yesterday we were gathering on a summer evening at Harbourfront Centre to celebrate our first-ever winners. The inaugural laureates included Molo’s Softlight, Valcucine’s Invitrum kitchen, Philippe Starck’s SensoWash toilet for Duravit, Matter Design’s Ply Shelves and Alex Josephson’s Temporary Mosque, all of which were featured in our accompanying exhibition. The jury was made up of Claude Cormier, Patty Johnson, Craig Dykers, Glenn Pushelberg and Eero Koivisto — we’ve been top-notch since the beginning! — who had gathered in Toronto to passionately deliberate over an entire day and decide the official honourees. For AZURE, the occasion set the tone for the 15 years that followed — establishing a benchmark for celebrating Canadian and international design in all of the categories, from products, interiors and buildings to landscapes and cities.

As we head into the 2025 edition — which is open for entries now, with an early bird deadline of January 31 — we reminisce on the moments that stand out across 15 inspiring years.

2011
The First-Ever AZ Awards Gala

The participants of our first edition are exceptionally worthy of praise. In addition to the winners mentioned above, our jury that year also recognized Patkau Architects’ arresting Linear House and Todd Saunders’ Long Studio, a precursor to the Fogo Island Inn and the first glimpse of Zita Cobb’s vision for the transformation of that singular place. But our standout highlight from that year is the gala and exhibition we staged at Harbourfront Centre, an evening that brought the design community together for a celebration of excellence.

2012
The People Had Spoken

Sugar Beach in Toronto

It wasn’t a jury winner (that year’s tough-as-nails panel eschewed a selection), but Sugar Beach by Claude Cormier et Associés, now CCxA, nabbed the People’s Choice. And it’s easy to understand why: The witty, charming landscape continues to inspire and delight. This show of love from the greater A&D community beautifully demonstrates the power of our People’s Choice online voting forum, where everyone can select their favourite finalists.

2013
Hygge House Had Us at Hello

It’s amazing what a can (or several gallons) of acid yellow paint can do. This temporary project, created by Plain Projects with Urbanink and Pike Projects, on the Red and Assiniboine rivers in Winnipeg as part of the city’s annual Warming Huts program, immersed us in vibrancy. So, we gave it the cover treatment.

2014
A Tale of Two Houses

Both Cliff House by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and Open House by Matthew Mazzotta took top prizes (albeit in different categories) in 2014. And they could not be more different. MLSA created a delicate balance with its humble home atop a cliff overlooking Nova Scotia’s Atlantic Coast, a wondrous respite that teetered over the sublime.

Meanwhile, Mazzotta’s Open House in Alabama seems like a humble home (though one reconstituted from a formerly blighted building) but it completely transforms into a 100-seat outdoor theatre. Taken together, these works represent the AZ Awards program’s dual embrace of pure architecture bona fides and whimsical curiosity.

2015
Beesley’s Breathing Architecture

Epiphyte Chamber, which won the Best Temporary Architecture category (it was originally installed at Seoul’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), exemplifies Philip Beesley’s wildly experimental and wildly beautiful creations. And “wild” is not entirely hyperbole: using nature as inspiration, Beesley’s work – wherein “masses of translucent cells resemble clusters of microscopic phytoplankton made gigantic” – posits a future in which buildings respond and react to us and other environmental stimuli.

2016
Castor Casts a Spell

Every year, we invite a local dynamo to create an installation that animates the gala. And in 2016, Castor brought Liberace x Flavin to the celebration. Featuring hundreds of fluorescent tubes clustered around a grand piano and “lit wirelessly through induction in the same vein as a Tesla coil,” the light sculpture was sound-sensitive, flickering in reaction to the pianist’s music. The result was as inventive and poetic as the brand’s best work.

2017
The Turenscape Era Begins

Bold visions for addressing climate change through landscape, architecture and criticism shone through in our 2017 edition. Most notably, this was the first year that we awarded Turenscape, the Beijing landscape architecture firm that has since gone on to scoop numerous AZ Awards for transforming massive post-industrial sites into living, thriving landscapes. We also honoured T3 Minneapolis by Michael Green Architecture; and Extraction, Canada’s official entry to the Venice architecture biennale, which critiqued the country’s over-reliance on mining in an environmentally depletive resource-focused economy.

2018
Special Guest Winy Maas

AZ Awards Guest of Honour Winy Maas takes the stage.

We’ve had many brilliant international guests join us through the years; they have included Karim Rashid, Gaetano Pesce, Martha Schwartz and Julie Bargmann. In 2018, our audience delighted in Winy Maas’s stage presence, where he praised AZURE for asking the tough questions about his Tianjin Binhai Library (and its mirage-like bookshelves). The standout winners of that cycle included the A+ Student Award winner Tangible Forms and two stellar and enduringly beloved Toronto projects: Hariri Pontarini’s Casey House and Public Work’s then-concept for The Bentway.

2019
Zaha For the Win

When Thom Mayne joined us as a juror, his aura was all-encompassing. So when the Pritzker Prize–winner made a case for Zaha Hadid’s 520 West 28th project, as divisive as her architecture is (and the development along the High Line overall has been), everyone listened. “Zaha Hadid’s voice was one of the most powerfully influential in the last half of the 20th century,” Mayne said. “When that vision was realized in built works such as this one, the results communicated a kinetic and dynamic energy that defined the essential nature of her profound talent.” Amen.

2020
The Pandemic Edition

Like everyone else during this first year of lockdowns, we at AZURE had to pivot: Travel bans precluded gathering everyone together in Toronto, so we assembled a remote jury, including trophy designer Luca Nichetto – who made the first-ever departure of our trophy theme – and we orchestrated a livestreamed event to announce the winners. It set the stage for a new AZ Awards website platform and showed us that when the going gets tough, the tech gods – at least this time around – have our back.

2021
Grayson Play Lab

We just loved this inventive, eclectic playground by Matter Design! It captured the prize in Concepts: Ideas and Prototypes, a category that delights in new and radical ideas.

2022
Two Dreams Come True

AZ Awards 2022 Winner: House of Dreams by Insitu Project

Well, actually, one of these dreams came true: House of Dreams in Zhoushan Village, China, represented a labour of love for local villagers who were able to create their new abodes on the site of the caves that once existed here (which had also served as their childhood homes). The materials are all recycled and their assembly was driven by craft and intuition – a truly wonderful result that won the Social Good category.

AZ Awards 2022 Winner: The Village Inside the Nuclear Power Plant by Sabina Blasiotti

The Village Inside the Nuclear Power Plant, on the other hand, might sound dystopian. Yet, it’s a fascinating exploration of what a defunct station in Mihama, Japan, could look like if reinvented. It won Sabina Blasiotti, who was enrolled at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, U.K., the A+ Student Award.

2023
Double Vision

We rarely have ties, but this year it was unavoidable. Ilulissat Icefjord Centre by Dorte Mandrup was up against Ace Hotel by Shim Sutcliffe. Perhaps two more different contexts could barely exist: an icefjord in Greenland and a downtown street in Toronto. Each building takes its site, history and cultural ambitions seriously. And both were clear winners.

2024
Environmental Moves

Our Environmental Leadership Award was originally created to honour projects and products that go above and beyond in their approach to sustainability. 2024 year was a bumper crop of achievements that celebrated green design, from Patricia Urquiola’s Sport fabric for Kvadrat and Public Work’s Steelport vision for Hamilton to WXY’s RISE UP, a remarkable project that regenerates the Rockaways.

2025
The Future Awaits!

We’re just getting started, but we’re excited to create an amazing awards cycle – with a new category celebrating EMERGING talents, a wonderful jury and soon-to-be announced trophy designer – and a gala that celebrates 15 years of excellence and counting.

The AZ Awards 2025 is presented by Keilhauer and Fisher & Paykel and sponsored by Colombo and Ligne Roset. The AZ Awards 2025 Gala Sponsor is Landscape Forms.

If you haven’t done so already, submit your best work now to the AZ Awards at awards.azuremagazine.com.

AZ Awards: 15 Highlights Across 15 Years

From our first gala to some of our most memorable winners and international guests, here are 15 moments we treasure as we head into the 2025 AZ Awards.

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