It's a great week when we get to congratulate our clients for making a strong showing in not just one but two awards programs over the course of seven days.

Congratulations Allen + Maurer Architects for their win of the  2013 AIBC Special Jury Award for Atypical Approach to a Typical Building Type! (a Serious Mouthful Of An Award Category Even By Architectural Awards Program Standards. One of the coolest things about the President's Awards Gala, the culminating event of the AIBC Annual Conference last Friday, was the recorded voiceovers reeling off the awards categories and project descriptions with a classically dramatic movie trailer voice. Archi-speak + big announcer voice is always a win in our books).

We photographed their project, Askew's Store, up in Salmon Arm early last summer, and the results looked great. It also was a great use of our medium format technical camera gear, as we got to use every last drop of the gorgeously large dynamic range you get when shooting on a technical camera. Grocery stores can be a pretty banal sort of building type, but the curved design, architectural detail, and copious use of BC wood elevates this project. As one juror said, "Someone loved this project." The architects and client weren't the only ones who loved it--we loved photographing it and are very happy it got recognition. This is one of our featured projects, so you can go explore the photos.

We also just got the welcome news that two of our other projects are 2013 Georgie Awards finalists. Congratulations to the crews at Vision Built and Jenny Martin Design for placing in two categories for West Side Renovation, which is a 2013 Finalist for Best Residential Renovation Over $800,000, and a 2013 Finalist for Best Kitchen Renovation Over $100,000. We always recommend entering in as many categories as your project could reasonably place in, and besides giving your project a wider "footprint", sometimes it also means that you place in multiple categories as well. Who doesn't love more chances to win?

And last, but by no means least, is the amazing showing by Porte's Origin project up at UniverCity at SFU. We photographed this for the Ovation Awards in the frozen dead of early December (in fact, we had exactly 10 minutes when the sun poked through the overcast gloom and lit up the south elevation…which we got to use by having a Genie lift at the ready and watching the sky carefully) last year. After it won two Ovation awards, the Porte team wisely decided that it could go further and would benefit from another visit to photograph the now-properly-furnished amenity spaces and now-properly-grown-in landscaping. It's a rare pleasure getting to do this: you get to see how a project changes, and it's always fun to see how things turned out and fill in a few gaps without having to be consistently blowing sheetrock dust off your camera lenses. The trip was worth it: Origin is a 2013 Georgie Awards finalist in three categories: Best Multi-Family Low Rise, Best Environmental Initiative, and the coveted Residential Community of the Year. Given that they are one of the few loft-style developments to do the Right Thing and orient the loft to actually get as much light as possible and not feel like a bunker, I'd happily move in to one of their units if only they were downtown and not on the hill (as an SFU grad, I've spent enough years looking down at the city, as pretty as that view is!)