CivMin’s Bo Zhao shares Best Architecture Award at 2022 Seismic Design Competition

Bo Zhao (Year 3 CivE) and Adela Hua (with their certificates for Best Architecture Award at the 2022 Seismic Design Competition at Salt Lake City, Utah.

A University of Toronto student team took top honours for architecture at an international competition. Congratulations to design and architecture lead Bo Zhao (Year 3 CivE) from the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, currently on PEY, and architecture lead Adela Hua a third-year student from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, who won the Best Architecture Award at the 2022 Seismic Design Competition at Salt Lake City, Utah. The event is held by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). 

The team designed a building titled “Tomorrow’s Tower” for the competition. View the score sheet here.

“They placed first out of 32 international teams and this is the best achievement in our team’s history, proving U of T has the best,” says U of T Seismic Design Team captain Eliza Van Weerdhuizen (EngSci 2T1). 

A rendering of the U of T entry titled Tomorrow’s Tower.

The team managed to present their project at the in-person event, with three members attending, but without any model to show. “Tragically, our model actually got lost in the airline and never made it to the competition on time. It is still somewhere in transit/storage with no news on when it will return home,” says Hua. The team persevered Hua recounts,”We were, however, still able to participate in all other parts of the competition, including the poster and power-point presentation where all components of the design were shown, including the model’s digital simulation, build process, and cost estimation.”