2026
Ouri Scott and Mari Fujita
Vancouver, BC
Margolese Design for Living Prize
Celebrating a Canadian designer whose work in the built environment improves the lives of people and their communities.
Congratulations to the 2026 Margolese Prize winners
Ouri Scott has dedicated her practice to designing housing and community infrastructure grounded in meaningful collaboration. Among the first Indigenous female architects in British Columbia, Scott integrates land-based practices, ceremony and gathering with contemporary design, creating spaces that are responsive to climate and long-term community needs.
Mari Fujita’s work as an educator, researcher and designer is grounded in reciprocity, long-term partnership and accountability to communities. An Associate Professor at UBC SALA, her practice spans architecture, community design, urban installation and product design, with a commitment to design in service of people, place and a more equitable and resilient future.
Learn more about the prize
The Margolese Design for Living Prize is a $50,000 award that recognizes a Canadian designer in early to mid-career whose work and advocacy in the built environment addresses the pressing human and environmental challenges of our time and improves peoples’ lives and communities.
The Prize is awarded by the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) whose commitment is to educate the next generation of architects, landscape architects and urban designers to become creative leaders, advocates, effective collaborators and progressive agents of change through design.
Architects
Landscape Architects
Planners
Designers
Engineers
& Practitioners in Allied Fields
The Margolese Design for Living Prize is open to any Canadian citizen who is doing outstanding work in a field related to the built environment. Suitable candidates might come from, but are not to be limited to the above disciplines.
Eligibility
Candidates for the prize are Canadian citizens and early to mid-career practitioners whose design work demonstrates wide environmental and social impact across a diversity of design disciplines and geographies.
For example, a candidate’s design work may have impact at any scale in any of the following areas:
- Affordable housing and social infrastructure
- Community design and public space
- Ecological design and biodiversity
- Climate change and resilience
- Human health and well-being
- Food security and water quality
- Social equity, diversity and environmental & social justice
- Mobility and transportation
- Disaster and pandemic relief
- Universal design and accessibility
Letter from SALA Professor
Ronald Kellett
Design is everywhere, and it matters, now more than ever. Society faces urgent, interconnected, global emergencies — of urbanization, climate change, natural environment, social equity and, human health and well-being. Design can enable creative solutions integrative of the diverse expertise necessary to meet these challenges. Design can inspire and empower people to safer, more independent, accessible and meaningful lives every day, at every scale, from the things we touch to the places we inhabit to the communities and infrastructure we share.
SALA is honoured to offer the Margolese Design for Living Prize — a distinction that speaks directly to the values and vision that have shaped the school since its inception in 2006. SALA is one of North America’s leading schools of architecture and landscape architecture.
Our academic programs integrate design, technical, theoretical and historical knowledge to enable a built environment supportive of civil and sustainable patterns of living. Our academic culture cultivates intellectual and creative leaders, articulate spokespersons and progressive agents of change. Through the Margolese Prize we aim to inspire students everywhere, by highlighting Canadians who are shaping their professions and the future of the built environment.
The Margolese Prize celebrates an individual whose contributions to the built environment advance their practice while visibly improving the quality of life for others. Please help us find, recognize and reward that person. Nominations are open annually from February through April 2023.
Timeline
Sep
2026
Winners announced