Buildings - Award

St. Clair Mausoleum at Prospect Cemetery
Address: 1450 St. Clair Ave. W.
Architect/Urban Designer: Baird Sampson Neuert Architects
Owner/Developer: Mount Pleasant Group of Cemeteries

Pat Bollenberghe
The desire to unify programme and site, inside and outside with the strategic selection of materials and site lines is for the most part very successful. It's only short-coming is in the lost opportunity to make a more meaningful public and visible urban connection to the street at the St. Clair Avenue gates - landscape could have been defined as the linking element.

Alex Krieger
In the contemporary world not often taught about as urban artifice, this mausoleum recalls the great European tradition of cemeteries as participants in city making. The St. Clair Mausoleum establishes a venerable urban gateway for Prospect Cemetery overall. It announces its function with dignity and without veils. It contributes fine architecture to the St. Clair streetscape. It is a proud home for the dead that with its transparency, facilitates two human contemplations: Even passersby on the street can for a moment ponder (what we tend to shy away from) our own mortality, while allowing those who come to honour the deceased to look upon the life on the street.

Bruce Kuwabara
This is an eloquent work of architecture, whose meaning operates at many levels. As an urban design strategy, the building forms part of a gateway condition into the vast park setting of Prospect Mausoleum. The large two-storey cubic part of the building contains the crypts. A gracefully curving, one-storey entrance element creates a bridge into the site and a threshold into the building. The stairs provide the key links in the architectural promenade. The combination of stone and glass simultaneously anchors the mausoleum to the ground and renders the building and promenade as something light and airy.

Lisa Rochon
It's odd to imagine that one of the city's most meditative spaces is a building sited along a busy main street. And yet, the stone and glass building communicates immediately with dignity; the vertical slot windows located across from each other on east-west axes connect the building to the bucolic cemetery. There are 1,100 crypts stacked on cross axes in the three-storey building. In lesser hands, the mausoleum might have felt cramped - but this design is invested with lightness and clarity.