Project focused on housing affordability earns Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award

A student project on revising building practices has won the Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award, which recognizes up and coming talents.

The CAGBC Awards celebrate the projects, teams and individuals advancing green building in Canada.

The Andy Kesteloo Memorial Project Award is presented in memory of Andy Kesteloo, a green building advocate. The 2024 award goes to a student project that showcases leadership, innovation, and a vision for the future of sustainable design in the field of green building and communities.

This year’s winner was Jonah Wright, a recent graduate of civil engineering from the University of Victoria, British Columbia (B.C.). Wright, who is motivated to find solutions to housing affordability issues, worked on his project for more than two years prior to incorporating it into his senior year research project course.

Throughout his studies, Wright realized that a leading contributor to project failure was miscommunication between project stakeholders, with information and understanding “often lost due to siloed thinking.” Another lesson Wright learned was that change in housing affordability is almost entirely on the shoulders of policymakers, which can be an challenge when it comes to fast change. Both of these lessons helped him define the scope of this project.

“I’ve always been interested in green building design all throughout university, so when I started looking through student work placements or co-ops during my degree, I was curious about how high-performance housing design and the housing crisis interact,” said Wright. “With those two points in mind, I wanted something that would be holistic in application that would simplify the design process while answering the question, what would it take to reliably mandate, design and deliver a home that is affordable, risk averse, and sustainable that can be adopted now?”

Wright’s project was an attempt to propose an alternative building design methodology where designers and engineers can implement direct responses to the housing crisis. The project investigated the housing situation from different perspectives while also exploring solutions that could lead to regional and site-specific design, based on research and data for a redevelopment site in Vancouver. The proposed holistic design process features various components, including Direct to Issue Design, Integrated Regional Mapping, and Beyond Code Level Site Specific Design.

The motivation behind these innovations was to achieve energy performance, structural resilience, and carbon reduction as well as economic considerations, with a cost analysis that looked into material depreciation, ongoing utility rates, inflation, and the number of income earners per unit. This approach was taken to ensure affordability and sustainability beyond the research project’s time of completion.

Wright, who is now a graduate, is looking to pursue a career in housing management, design or a related field. He hopes to continue exploring new approaches to housing as well as build on his student project experience to better address housing issues.