2025 BEST OF  
THE BEST AWARDS
TCA HONOURS ITS BEST PERFORMERS
By Matthew Bradford
INDUSTRY EXCELLENCE took centre stage at the 2025 TCA Best of the Best Awards. Held during TCA’s 
158th annual general meeting on Feb. 24, 2026, the gala celebrated the individuals and organizations 
that exemplified leadership, innovation and impact throughout the preceding year.
Congratulations to all nominees, and to the following winners of TCA’s 2025 Best of the Best Awards.
PROJECT ACHIEVEMENT AWARD | LARGE 
PCL CONSTRUCTORS CANADA INC. | LIMBERLOST PLACE
In March 2025, PCL Constructors Canada 
Inc. completed work on George Brown 
College’s Limberlost Place, a first-of-its-
kind mass timber institutional building in 
Ontario, and a worthy recipient of TCA’s 
Project Achievement Award.
The 10-storey, 225,000-square-foot 
net-zero facility is a hybrid mass timber 
and steel building designed by Moriyama 
Teshima Architects in joint venture 
with Acton Ostry Architects. As Sean 
Shagabaga, projects director with PCL 
Constructors Canada Inc. (Toronto), notes, 
it “fundamentally rethinks how mass 
timber can perform at scale,” featuring 
three-storey mass timber columns and 
a prefabricated mass timber pedestrian 
bridge connecting Limberlost Place 
to GBC’s adjacent Daphne Cockwell 
Building. “That was an incredible feat 
of engineering and collaboration,” 
Shagabaga adds. “Suspended six 
storeys above grade and longer than the 
opening it spanned, the bridge had to 
be lifted, rotated and drifted into place 
with millimetre-level tolerances.” Thanks 
to precision planning, the bridge was 
successfully installed in under  
30 minutes through real-time problem-
solving and teamwork.
Among other notable features include 
a first-of-its-kind slab band structural 
system created by Fast + Epp, capable of 
spanning nine metres without using deep 
beams, while also fitting 10 storeys within 
the site’s 38-metre height limit. 
Notably, Limberlost Place is also designed 
to minimize embodied carbon and 
operational emissions. It achieves this 
through optimized daylighting and natural 
ventilation systems, along with solar 
chimneys and photovoltaic panels. The 
design also incorporates Enwave Energy 
Corporation’s Deep Lake Water Cooling 
System to harness green energy from 
Lake Ontario for cooling and heating. The 
building is currently targeting LEED® Gold 
certification and Toronto Green Standard 
Tier 4.
PCL attributes the success of Limberlost 
Place to the team’s collaborative, 
multidisciplinary delivery model. From the 
start, Shagabaga explains, George Brown 
Polytechnic brought all partners together 
as an integrated group with shared 
responsibility for outcomes. “Given the 
project’s first-of-its-kind nature, this level 
of integration was essential. Continuous 
collaboration enabled the team to identify 
risks early, test solutions collectively and 
align ambitious sustainability and design 
goals with real-world construction and 
code requirements.”
Limberlost Place has accrued 
several industry awards throughout 
its development. Like its latest TCA 
Award, PCL considers them a shared 
achievement. In “creating a new era” 
for GBC students and the architectural, 
engineering and construction industry, 
Shagabaga speaks for the team when he 
says, “Limberlost Place exemplifies what’s 
possible through collaboration, out-of-the-
box thinking and a shared commitment to 
building a resilient future.”
BUILDERSDIGEST   Quarter 1  2026   19
THE BEST OF THE BEST AWARDS

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