The AZ awards is an initiative of Azure, an award-winning magazine with a focus on contemporary architecture and design. Now in its 8th Year, the gala night was celebrated at Evergreen Brick Works, Canada’s first large-scale community environmental centre which used to be a brick factory in the 1800’s in the Don Valley Area, in Toronto.

The installation, designed by Giannone Petricone Associates, was meant to pay homage to the Brick Works’ past and present with bundles of red bricks that created a series of altars as social condensers; and, towers of wood pallets, that punctuated the crowd with lit Totems. The pallets, stacked 20 high, were lit from within with string lights, providing frames to peer through, while floodlights were strategically aimed at both Big Bertha (the huge heritage protected pipe suspended in the ceiling) and to illuminate the building’s great structure. This witty reference to both the raw materials and built forms of architecture served as gathering points – the brick bundles functioning as high tables – and framing devices that displayed histories of Don Valley Brick in the form of batch tags.