For the first time in the history of the Green Building Festival, all three 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award winners are women and leading architects from Canada.

The winners, Teresa Coady, Janna Levitt and Birgit Siber, will receive their awards in front of hundreds of colleagues on October 8th in Toronto.

The Lifetime Achievement Awards acknowledge green building initiatives through advocacy, research, innovation and design excellence across a range of building types.

“The awards signal exemplary devotion to the cause of greater sustainability in the built environment,” says Mike Singleton, executive director of Sustainable Buildings Canada, the non-profit that bestows the awards each year.

Teresa Coady

Teresa Coady is internationally recognized for her innovative thinking and her leadership in sustainability and works closely with various agencies to create new policies and practices to benefit society. Coady was formerly the chief operating officer, COO, of Kasian, an international design firm, and president and CEO of Bunting Coady B+H. Her first book, ‘Rebuilding the Planet, The 12 Principles of Conscious Construction’ will be distributed Spring 2020 by Random House.

Janna Levitt

Janna Levitt co-founded LGA Architectural Partners (formerly Levitt Goodman Architects). She believes buildings can serve as a connector between culture and people. Her projects often involve implementing transformative cultural and environmental agendas, developed with diverse group of collaborators and communities.

Birgit Siber

Principal at Diamond Schmitt Architects, Birgit Siber led the design installation of the first large-scale living wall biofilter in Canada more than a decade ago at the University of Guelph Humber campus. Its success spawned dozens more in Diamond Schmitt projects in Canada and the U.S. She also spearheaded ecoMetrics, an energy-use benchmarking databank and analysis tool to highlight and inform strategies for energy-use reduction.