Alumna Samantha Eby receives 2020 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners

University of Toronto alumna Samantha Eby has been named the recipient of the 2020 Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioners.

The prestigious $34,000 prize is awarded annually by the Canada Council for the Arts to a recent architecture graduate who has demonstrated potential in contemporary architectural design.

It’s the third consecutive year the prize has been won by U of T alumni. Eby, who graduated from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design’s master of architecture program in 2019, follows Kinan Hewitt, who graduated in 2018, and David Verbeek, who graduated in 2017.

Eby “balances a deep curiosity for the economies that contribute to architecture and urbanism with a provocative and tangible design sensibility," says her thesis advisor, Assistant Professor Michael Piper.

Once travel restrictions are lifted, Eby plans to use her new funding on research trips to Australia, Germany and Austria to visit and document examples of collective and non-profit housing developments.

"My research is looking for unrealized opportunities in Canada for new forms of housing that are outside the current practices of financing and site development," she says. "I'm looking at questions of how housing in Canada can be more than just a commodity, and how, by using communal financing and development practices, we can make multi-unit housing more accessible, sustainable, and desirable."

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