New Student Residence at Queen’s receives Kingston Livable City Design Award
For more information, please contact:
Andrea Chin, Communications Director
Email: achin@dsai.ca
Don Schmitt, Principal
Email: dschmitt@dsai.ca
Kingston, ON – Every three years, the City of Kingston’s Planning and Services Department coordinates the Kingston Livable City Design Awards to recognize new buildings that enhance the community’s visual identity and quality of the environment.
The Endaayaan-Tkanónsote Student Residence at Queen’s University, designed in joint venture with Shoalts and Zaback Architects Ltd., has been honoured with a 2023 Kingston Livable City Design Award for its positive contribution to Kingston’s cityscape and the community that calls it home.
Endaayaan-Tkanónsote Student Residence achieved an Award of Excellence for its sustainable and welcoming spaces. Designed with the character of the city in mind, the building integrates two of the original five houses from the site into its design to maintain the look and feel of the surrounding community. It offers 334 fully equipped rooms and a range of modern and accessible amenities throughout. This includes a courtyard for Indigenous gatherings, where members of the community can gather and reflect. The building design has also achieved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification, contributing to the university’s overall sustainability efforts.
“[We were] impressed with the seamless insertion of a high-density student residence in an historic streetscape,” said the jury in its comments on the project. “Both the design of the new residence, which incorporates two historic houses, and the preservation of mature street trees, help to soften the impact of the new building and maintain the existing streetscape character. The historic houses have been carefully repaired and rehabilitated as part of the new residence and the intersection between the new and old is legible and successful in maintaining the historic houses’ prominence and identity.”
The building was officially named Endaayaan-Tkanónsote in March 2023 in recognition of the region’s Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Indigenous communities, on whose traditional territory lands the university resides, and means “home” in both Anishinaabemowin (Ojibway) and Kanyen’kéha (Mohawk).
Read more about the winning design here.