The OAA held its annual Conference at the Westin Ottawa from May 14 to 16, 2025, bringing together more than 500 delegates from the architecture profession and beyond to network, celebrate, and explore the built environment’s role in Reshaping Communities. In the weeks to come, the OAA will add photo galleries of the highlights to the website, but here is a quick recap on some of the major happenings from last week.

Building on previous Conference themes and sessions, Reshaping Communities featured new conversations about how places shape people’s behaviour, how an evolving built environment can effectively respond to and reflect societal changes, and how impacts at both local and global scales are converging.

It brought together members of the architectural profession and other thought leaders from across the province and beyond, including a roster of expert speakers to lead classroom Continuing Education lectures, Experiential Learning sessions around Ottawa, and Sponsored Learning sessions during meals.

This full slate of programming included urban revitalization, adaptive reuse, inclusive design, Reconciliation, the intersection of the built and natural environments, the architecture profession’s ability to respond to new challenges and opportunities, as well as a series of special events for networking and celebrating the practice of architecture.

The OAA would like to thank all the participants for attending the 2025 Conference as well as the event sponsors for their support, allowing the Association to offer high-quality programming that offers great value—saving attendees more than 30% of their registration costs!

Plenaries

The Conference was bookended by two plenaries. It began with a special welcome from OAA President Ted Wilson before a deep dive with the first plenary, “Transforming Communities through a Participative Design Process.” Led by Jan Knikker, partner and director of strategy at MVRDV, it explored the Reshaping Communities theme through sharing some of the work of the award-winning Rotterdam-founded architectural and urban design practice. Knikker showed how MVRDV approaches its projects—from individual buildings to large-scale urban master plans—through a participatory process, and how this additional effort led to more meaningful results.

The closing Plenary, “Reimagining Heritage: A Net-Zero Indigenous Cultural Space,” commenced with President Wilson and OAA Executive Director Kristi Doyle acknowledging the contributions of past members of Council Greg Redden and Christina Karney. It also included the induction of Dr. Ted Kesik into the Association as the newest Honorary Member. President Wilson also revealed the theme for next year’s event in the Waterloo Region as Collaboration Powering Innovation.

This was followed by a special panel on the Kingston Native Centre + Language Nest (KNCLN), reflecting on the Reshaping Communities theme by examining the ongoing reimagining of a heritage building as an Indigenous cultural space through extensive rehabilitation and addition. The presenters—CSV Architects’ Camille Lewis and Darryl Hood, as well as KNCLN’s Brandon Maracle and the City of Kingston’s Ruth Noordegraaf—explored the Indigenous collaborative design process established from the project’s inception, and the goal of achieving an 80% net-zero-energy facility.

SHIFT Challenge Celebration

At the SHIFT25 Challenge Celebration, OAA Senior Vice President & Treasurer Lara McKendrick introduced the project teams behind the six jury-selected submissions for this year’s aspirational ideas competition:

• Subdivillage (team led by Architects Naama Blonder and Misha Bereznyak);
• The City Limits: Rethinking a 100-year-old Toronto Suburb (team led by Architect Tim Scott);
• Swansea Park: A Development Concept for the Former Swansea Mews (team led by Architect David Peterson);
• Parkdale Commons: A Living Food Bank (team led by Architects Luc Johnston and Nancy Chao);
• The Living Core: Designing for Resiliency at Home (team led by Architect David DiGiuseppe); and
• Speculative Assemblies: From Pine Needles to Pressed Coffee (team led by Architect Jerry Hacker).

The biennial OAA Awards program aims to show the public how architectural thinking can offer new approaches to societal issues, with the current focus on communities. A digital version of this year’s SHIFT book will be made available next month, and another in-person lecture event is being planned for Toronto in the fall.

Other Special Events

During the Blueprint for Innovation: Ask the Experts Luncheon, attendees were able to engage directly with product-knowledge experts in intimate roundtable discussions. Over three rounds of conversation, OAA members could address their most pressing architectural challenges, explore cutting-edge solutions, and gain invaluable insights from seasoned architectural/construction/engineering professionals.

There was also the OAA’s Opening Night Party, which was presented by the Ottawa Regional Society of Architects (ORSA) at the Ottawa Art Gallery—whose expansion led by Barry Padolsky Associates Inc. and KPMB Architects (advocate architects) was a 2022 finalist for an OAA Design Excellence Award.

The annual Archifête party took place at the Canadian Museum of Nature, enabling delegates to mingle among peers in the Water Gallery and Earth Gallery at the Tudor-Gothic Revival-style building, originally designed by David Ewart with 21st century additions by Barry Padolsky Associates Inc., KPMB Architects, and Gagnon Joint Venture Architects.