OAA SHIFT2025 Challenge: Now Open for Submissions

The SHIFT2025 Challenge, Reshaping Communities, is now open for submissions. This biennial OAA awards program is an aspirational ideas competition. It looks to highlight the architecture profession’s distinct contribution to addressing societal issues, with past themes having focused on health, resiliency, and infrastructure.

The SHIFT Challenge is open to individuals or teams led by someone with OAA status: an Architect, Intern Architect, Student Associate, Retired Member, or Honorary Member. All submissions (text, images, and a short video) are reviewed by a special jury of experts from the architecture profession and beyond. The jurors will be introduced in the weeks to come.

Selected SHIFT2025 submissions are collected in a special publication and shared online, as well as celebrated at next year’s Conference in Ottawa.

This Year’s Theme: Reshaping Communities

The buildings, homes, and public spaces making up our communities should be built to last, but how does enduring design account for everything else being in constant change? To really stand the test of time, adaptability is needed. We reshape our built environment and, in turn, it reshapes us.

Altered climate patterns have increased the intensity and frequency of extreme weather in Canada and beyond. Political instability outside our borders, technological advancements, and social change have brought uncertainty, but also opportunity and new ways to think about how we can ensure people’s needs are met in times of urgency.

The OAA’s SHIFT Challenge asks the profession to explore how we can develop sustainable solutions. From urban revitalization and reconceptualization to adaptations responding to climate change and other emergencies, SHIFT2025 seeks your conceptual—but possible!—architectural ideas for our communities that enable all people to find stability, a sense of belonging, and hope.

To learn more about the program, visit ShiftChallenge.ca or email shiftchallenge@oaa.on.ca.