2025 Winners – DAVIDSON RAFAILIDIS

Stephanie Davidson and Georg Rafailidis work together as DAVIDSON RAFAILIDIS. The interest underlying much of their work is the friction between the original design intentions for spaces and buildings, and the much richer built reality and unpredictable lives that buildings inevitably have. In most of their work, they study existing built conditions—sometimes these studies evolve into built works and sometimes the studies take the form of documentation (drawings, photographs, writing). Both Davidson and Rafailidis are currently faculty members at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University.

They plan to take their time at Saint-Edmond-de-Grantham to observe, firstly, the space of the residency, which is primarily a wooded area—a kind of environment that doesn’t necessarily call for architecture in a conventional sense. With the conviction that space is wild, they will work on architectural expressions that take the location as an invitation to imagine architecture as non-static, responsive, alive, idiosyncratic, temporal: the opposite of the stark duality that is often captured by images of a small hut in a forest.  The anticipated outcome is a non-typological spatial gesture that allows for the wildness of architectural space.

To find out more about DAVIDSON RAFAILIDIS, click here. 

Winner 2024 — Camille Lefebvre 

Based in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal, Camille Lefebvre is an architect with a multidisciplinary practice at the crossroads of two main axes: housing in density and issues of architectural representation in the digital age. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture from the Université de Montréal and is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships. She was a finalist for the Canada Council's Prix de Rome in Architecture (Emerging Practitioners). 

Her research and creation project at the Foundation in June 2024 aims to take a critical and constructive look at the sprawl of Quebec's towns and villages. Taking the Grantham Foundation and nearby villages as a starting point, the project is part of a desire to sensitively densify Quebec's urban fabric, caught between the housing crisis and the climate emergency. These issues will be addressed by the model as a vector of research-creation with a dual function: as an act of design and as a mediation tool for a wider public. 

To find out more about Camille Lefebvre, click here. 

2023 Winners — Sébastien Roy and Jérémie Dussault-Lefebvre

Originally from Montreal, Sébastien Roy and Jérémie Dussault-Lefebvre shared university studies in Montreal (BAC) and Vancouver (M.ARCH), followed by professional experiences in Europe (Berlin, Milan, Brussels). Having imagined, designed, built and published projects together in Canada and abroad, Sébastien and Jérémie naturally decided to establish themselves as official collaborators following their repeated partnerships. Their stay abroad has allowed them to multiply their learning, particularly during their time at institutions such as TU Delft, the Porto Academy, the University of Nairobi and the University of Malta.

Using the Foundation building as an object of study during their residency and following a two-stage approach (inventory and recomposition), the duo aim to privilege a methodology of prospecting and producing alternative visions of the site, as if they were proposing to "deconstruct" and "reconstruct" the pavilion. With a view to environmental exhaustion, working with the existing building, its surroundings and heritage is at the heart of their audacious proposal.