RAIC 2025 Gold Medal: Fierce, Passionate, Visionary
Phyllis Lambert CC GOQ FRAIC FRSC RCA
Founding Director Emeritus, Canadian Centre for Architecture
I am totally delighted that Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg have been honoured as joint recipients of the 2025 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Gold Medal, the highest award honouring the contribution of architects to our society. Founding partners of KPMB Architects, they have profoundly contributed to architecture that enriches the public realm.
Marianne McKenna has continuously emphasized the role, needs and pleasure of the user and the public with sustainability, tradition, and innovation, in designing for the most positive impact on the urban and natural environment. At her highly accomplished Royal Conservatory Koerner Hall, outstanding acoustics are achieved with the innovative use of natural materials, creating an extraordinary environment for the audience. Similarly, the trajectory through the existing neo-Romanesque building, arriving at the glass wall lobby and its privileged view, add to this very fine experience. At McGill University, McKenna has created dynamic spaces for interaction and collaboration, embodying her belief that the spirit of a building resides in its social spaces.
Shirley Blumberg’s impactful work centres on social justice and the urban context’s role in fostering community. Blumberg has designed affordable housing projects for several communities. Projects such as affordable housing for Toronto Community Housing and prototypical housing for the Indigenous community of Fort Severn further demonstrate her commitment to equitable design. Blumberg’s winning submission for the Holocaust Museum in Montreal, soon to be in construction, will add a much-needed sensitivity and a place of discourse around prejudice and its effects on community. A leader of BEAT (Building Equality in Architecture Toronto), Blumberg champions equity and diversity in the profession. In 2022, Blumberg was in residence at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA),
exploring new readings of our holdings that highlight the intellectual relevance of John C. Parkin’s role as a proponent and key actor in the modernization of Canadian cities in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although I have noted only a few of the projects in the wide-ranging work of Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg, both have served
on numerous juries and delivered lectures worldwide, earning widespread recognition for their transformative contributions. Together, they have redefined architecture, seamlessly blending visionary design with social responsibility, and continue to shape Canada’s architectural future.
Brigitte Shim and A. Howard Sutcliffe FRAIC, OC, RCA, Hon. FAIA, OAA
Principals, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects
2021 RAIC Gold Medal Winners
Shirley Blumberg and Marianne McKenna have built an exemplary body of built projects—the work of their firm, KPMB, has been recognized by 18 Governor General’s Medals for Architecture and many other professional accolades. As two of its founding partners, McKenna and Blumberg have become inspirational architects for an entire generation.
Through the years, the balance created by the founding partners has been advanced and made richer as their practice has developed and matured. Our profession still lacks equity and diversity, but co-recipients Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg have worked tirelessly towards building a more inclusive architectural practice.
In order to do so, they have designed and redesigned their practice itself. In 2024, the KPMB studio, under the direction of McKenna and Blumberg, created a flattened boardroom to provide a democratic and safe space where every team member is heard. Both McKenna and Blumberg have taken the opportunity to support the strengths of their unique model of practice, understanding that broad diversity and gender balance contribute to more inclusive architecture. They have a hand in reevaluating the kinds of projects KPMB will take on, ensuring alignment between the firm’s values and its work. The result is a compassionate and inclusive KPMB studio culture, committed to creating thoughtful, meaningful, and regenerative architectural solutions that contribute to a future world that we all want to live in.
Some 25 years ago, Marianne McKenna led KPMB’s first federal government commission—a women’s prison with a social justice agenda to transform the model from punishment to creating choices for women to transform their lives. This foundational project for their young firm demonstrated that they could realize a complex institution that had a positive impact on many lives. In 1997, KPMB Architects received a Governor General’s Award of Merit and an AIA Honor Award for the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario: a recognition that good design can aid in changing lives. The projects Marianne McKenna has chosen to tackle have resulted not only in designing buildings, but also in transforming cultural institutions. She has worked with the Royal Conservatory of Music for over two decades, resulting in a vital music campus for education and performance: its showpiece, Koerner Hall, is widely recognized as one of the finest musical venues in North America. Marianne McKenna also led the recent restoration and transformation of Massey Hall, working with heritage consultants GBCA Architects, and has ensured that this fine space will continue to be a mecca for our community.
Shirley Blumberg has led social justice-oriented projects within the firm, working on prototypical housing for the northern
Indigenous community of Fort Severn in collaboration with Brian Porter of Two Row Architect, affordable student housing on the UBC Campus in joint venture with hcma, and numerous projects for Toronto Community Housing. She was a founding member of Building Equity in Architecture in Toronto (BEAT), promoting equity for women and minorities in the profession through action-oriented initiatives.
The recognition of Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg as co-recipients of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal acknowledges the contribution of two pioneering female practitioners who have worked tirelessly—in tandem and individually—to transform our profession and redefine contemporary practice in Canada.
Deborah Berke FAIA, LEED AP
Dean and J.M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture, Yale School
of Architecture
2025 AIA Gold Medal Winner
It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Shirley Blumberg and Marianne McKenna on being named the joint recipients of the 2025 RAIC Gold Medal. They and their firm, KPMB, are supremely good architects and they are also significantly good people. This matters.
Wherever they build, McKenna and Blumberg’s work is driven by their admirable principles to create inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and community-based architecture. They design thoughtful buildings for people in a wide range of project types from museums to performing arts centres, hospitals, universities, office towers, residential buildings, and religious institutions, to name a few. Their work elevates the human experience, creating places of purpose and cultural significance.
In my role as the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, I invited Marianna McKenna to be the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor in 2016, a position intended to bring top talent and international faculty at the school. Others who have held this position include David Chipperfield, Zaha Hadid, Tatiana Bilbao, and Brigitte Shim. It was her first ever advanced studio at Yale and was wonderfully received. The quality of work was impressive, as was the student engagement to the subject matter. Ms. McKenna gave a lecture at the school titled “Urban Good” to a packed auditorium. It was a superb talk, illustrating KPMB’s built work, and raising important questions about community and advocacy.
Sarah Polley OC
Filmmaker and writer
First things first. You don’t mess with Shirley Blumberg. I mean, truly. Do not mess with this woman. Whether she is advocating for equity and inclusivity, or showing fierce loyalty to her loved ones and those she works with, she has an incomparable fight in her that makes her astounding accomplishments unsurprising to anyone who knows her well.
I am not in the world of architecture myself. From the outside, it is always moving to me that, with all of the prestigious work she has done over the years, what Shirley is clearly most proud of are the projects with a social justice focus. I have seen her sit on the floor with my children for hours, building structures out of magna tiles, describing what it means to her to have designed affordable housing projects for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, giving my kids a sense of what it means to have purpose in one’s work.
Shirley has a deep sense of duty to what she loves and she shows it with all of her awesome strength and force of will. As a neighbour, she might suddenly appear in your house with a vat of homemade soup if you are ill and organize a medical appointment you’ve been putting off. (God help you if you don’t go.) Shirley brings this focused, active love into her work, consistently finding the path to contributing to the social good. Her advocacy and deep principles manifest a toughness that gets the impossible done, time and time again.
Meryl Streep
Actress
Half a century ago, my graduate school roommate, Marianne McKenna, and I sat at our tiny kitchen table in New Haven. She was pursuing an M.Arch at the Yale School of Art & Architecture, and I was getting an MFA at the Drama School next door. She taught me a lesson about collaboration in art and acting, which marked my life and work ever since. The conversation was about dreaming a building into being and the responsibility in that act. Marianne was showing me a book by Robert Venturi, ‘Learning from Las Vegas’, explaining the idea of context in design: How will a new building speak, visually, to its surroundings? Is it listening to the community into which it intends to plunk itself? Is it a good neighbour?”
I thought about where we sat, on the top floor of a (probably) 19th-century, three-story small brick house close to the campus. A few blocks down Chapel Street, Louis Kahn’s monumental minimalist steel-clad Yale Center for British Art was under construction. Nearby, Marianne’s studies were conducted in Paul Rudolph’s brutalist, rough-edged concrete statement building, which sat next to the Drama school—squat and familiar in the faux Gothic style favoured by the Ivy League—which (I remembered as an undergraduate) was once the DKE fraternity house. What could we make of the conversation these entities were engaged in?
It was the first time I had heard the word “vernacular” used, not to refer to language, but to convey the integrated aesthetic of place: the context, the visual language of a neighbourhood, and the common contours of community. Marianne was thinking in a different way than some architects of that moment in time; less fixed on the stand-alone, look-at-me statement, she was expressing, in dreaming a building into being, the listening responsibility of that dream. The responsibility not only to make beauty, and/or maximum individual impact, but to design, in deliberate opposition to, or in lively agreement with, the existing context in mind.
For me, as an actor, there were so many parallels. There is the joke among actors that on reading a script, we all skip ahead to the pages where we talk, then rapidly flip through the next pages, “Blah Blah Blah,” till we get to ME! again… And as a young actor, filled with desire, energy, ideas, and feelings, it is easy to want to jump in and shine. But we learn well to know that the artists most alive to others are the most alive. Those who listen best, serve the story best. Their humility only burnishes the gleam of their gifts—those whose grace and fluid willingness to listen, as well as lead, only pull our attention to them more intently. You do not need to grab the spotlight; you just need to serve the story you are there to tell, and the spotlight will find you.
In the year of our conversation, 1975, there was scant evidence of a welcoming landscape for young women architects in the field. However, in a can-do atmosphere of optimism, Marianne’s cohort was arguably the breakthrough class. Within a few years of her graduation, she had begun the process of forming her own standalone firm of four partners: two women and two men of equal status and responsibility, practically unheard of at that time.
Today, that same, now celebrated, firm employs over 130 people in a rigorous practice whose commissions extend throughout Canada and the United States. Marianne has garnered over 75 important architectural awards, honours, citations, and now, the highest honour an architect can achieve in Canada, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal. So, her work is not without ego—she is plenty bull-headed in pursuit of a point—but it is respect paid, respect earned.
Of her many and varied designs, one stands out, for me, aesthetically, materially, and even spiritually. Koerner Hall, at the Royal Conservatory of Music, is Marianne’s gift made manifest. The exterior causes no ruckus with its neighbors—behind an elegantly updated, deceptively well-ordered facade, lies the exuberant, sensuous beating heart of creativity. Inside, the curved and soaring wood-beamed ribs of the concert hall (as if from Jonah’s point of view inside the whale) unfurl sound in an unparalleled, artistic triumph.
Sitting next to her in the seats behind the orchestra one afternoon, we heard Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, and I looked over at my friend and thought: this is Marianne—beautiful and restrained on the outside, inside, full-throated passion and artistic expression. SO CANADIAN.
I am in awe, and still learning from her. Congratulations to my splendid pal!
Omar Gandhi NSAA, OAA, AIBC, FRAIC
Founder, Omar Gandhi Architects
In 2004, as an undergraduate student of the School of Architecture and Planning at Dalhousie University I had the honour of working
at what was then Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects in their downtown Toronto studio at King and John Streets.
I spent a portion of my co-op work term on the Concordia University Molson School of Business, led by Marianne McKenna. When
I returned to the studio as a recent graduate four years later, I would join Marianne again as a junior member of her team working on the Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo. Both experiences were invaluable in my growth as an architect working on some of the best work produced in the country, listening, learning and growing under Marianne McKenna’s visionary leadership.
Over a decade later, as the principal of my own Halifax-based firm, I had the opportunity to collaborate on the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia international design competition with Shirley Blumberg. It was both the experience of a lifetime, and a joy to watch and learn from Shirley. Her graceful command of the project as we worked through the competition process and eventual project (which we won) was, to say the least, inspirational.
Together, Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg represent the pinnacle of architectural practice in Canada. Their unwavering dedication to innovative design, community engagement, and social equity not only enriches the profession but also serves as a source of inspiration for countless architects and designers. Recognizing them with the Gold Medal honours their individual achievements but also celebrates their shared vision for a better, more inclusive, and sustainable built environment.
It is long overdue that we give credit where credit is due in the architecture profession, especially in Canada. Marianne and Shirley in their own rights are individually deserving of the RAIC Gold Medal. Their individual portfolios over the past four decades helped to shape Canadian architectural discourse. Too often do we dissolve the fair credit of female practitioners and highlight the accomplishments of their male counterparts. Two of the founding partners of Canada’s most illustrious architecture practice are women, and their accomplishments have inspired two generations of contemporary architects in Canada and abroad.
Ken Greenberg CM FRAIC
Principal, Greenberg Consultants
The KPMB partnership occupies a particular place of esteem and respect among Canadian practices for combining a commitment
to design excellence with public service, and Shirley Blumberg has played a major role in sustaining that dual focus.
I have known Shirley for many years and through numerous collaborations. In all these situations, what has set her apart is her passionate dedication to architecture as a social art with obligations to society that go well beyond the programmatic requirements of a given project.
Most notable examples for me include our work on Ottawa’s Global Centre for Pluralism for the Aga Khan Foundation of Canada, where, with Shirley’s expertise, we created a compelling vison that expressed the Aga Khan’s broad and generous ambition for a Rideau-Canal-to-Rideau-River public connection on the Ottawa River banks, which has catalyzed the ongoing work of the National Capital Commission.
Another was our pro bono work on the Design Review Panel for Toronto Community Housing, overseeing the plans for the revitalization of Regent Park—and eventually all of the TCHC transformational projects in that area. Shirley had a penetrating way of seeing and seizing on the potential for architecture to enhance and enrich people’s lives in ways both large and small.
Shirley’s strong commitment to place-making and design quality makes each of her architectural and urban design projects into compelling demonstrations of sustainability and effective city building. This dedication was always very much in evidence as her career and interests have continued to evolve, with an emphasis on the contributions that design innovation and research can make in addressing the global issues of environmental sustainability, social equity, and
inclusion. It can be argued that both in Canada and abroad, her work exhibits a particular Canadian sensibility in reconciling these goals.
Shirley is also rare among architects for her fearless principled advocacy. Her background in South Africa in the apartheid era has sensitized her to the need to speak out and make use of her talents and knowledge—again pro bono—where the public interest is challenged, and her values lead her into the fray. A notable example being her contribution, as part of a group of local experts, to generating a counterplan that successfully showed how the historic Dominion Foundry Buildings in Toronto’s West Don Lands, already partially under the wrecking ball, could be saved—and that contributed to the retention of those buildings.
Meg Graham OAA FRAIC
Partner, Superkül
If I had to pick one word that defines Marianne McKenna it is: fierce. She is a powerful advocate for her projects, her clients, and her staff, and I have been fortunate in my career to have been both a witness to—and beneficiary of—that strength of character.
As a project designer at KPMB, I can recall meetings I attended with Marianne where she literally stood up and fought for the good of a project. She was a model of professional fortitude and resilience, at a time when that wasn’t a buzzword.
I have been in rooms with her since, and nothing has changed: she continues to bring that same unflagging dedication and clarity of vision to every project she shepherds into the world. Her standards are high, her mind is incisive, and her spirit is deeply collaborative and generous. And she is a highly committed mentor and champion.
Over 20 years ago, when I was working at KPMB, I was accepted into the Master in Design Studies program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Part of my funding fell through at the last minute, and I was resigned to declining the offer of admission. When I asked the partners at KPMB if I could stay on working at the office, they instead surprised me by offering to loan me the money. It was an extraordinary gesture—and one that I will never forget.
The partners’ act in itself was equally transformative: it taught me a crucial lesson about what it means to invest in people, and how simple acts of kindness and support can change the course of people’s lives. With that gratitude still in my heart, I celebrate both Marianne and Shirley for this much-deserved recognition.
Betsy Williamson OAA FRAIC
Co-founder, Williamson Williamson Architects
Nine years ago, Shirley and I met for lunch, and the topic quickly turned to recent efforts each of us had made reaching out to women in the architecture community regarding the lack of equity in the profession. She had recently been hosting regular meetings with a core group of women in her firm, digging into the issues of equity in her own office, and she understood that there was both a need and an appetite for change.
She connected this work with a recent lecture series she had been a part of at Princeton and in about 20 minutes, we had a plan for the first BEAT event: a leadership seminar to be held at two architecture schools in Toronto where we could have frank conversations about equity in the profession, and then tour the young women and men through projects, connecting the conversations to real work.
Shirley’s leadership in founding BEAT—Building Equality in Architecture Toronto—stands as a testament to her commitment to promoting equity in the profession. This grassroots initiative has evolved into a nationwide organization, with chapters from Atlantic Canada to the West Coast, that is committed to creating lasting systemic and transformational change, understanding that empowering women in the design community improves and enriches the practice of architecture, the quality of the built environment, and ultimately, the human experience.
Shirley Blumberg’s influence extends far into the realms of academia, cultural institutions, social justice, and the broader architectural discourse. It is her work, however, with this grassroots organization that makes her extra special to our community. As a leader of the most influential architecture firm in Canada, her actions will be reflected and amplified by others. When BEAT was founded, no one else in Canada at her level of practice would have done this work.
She has always been a leader in design and building, but, in addition to this, her work advocating for women in architecture will make a longstanding impact in our field.
As appeared in the 2025 RAIC Gold Medal issue of Canadian Architect magazine (May 2025)
The post RAIC 2025 Gold Medal: Fierce, Passionate, Visionary appeared first on Canadian Architect.
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