With this year’s celebration of the Bytown Bicentennial, we’re prompted to reflect on the city’s origin story. Rather than tracing its beginnings to colonial settlement, we begin with water. Long before the control of maps, boundaries, or industry, the watershed was a living system of movement, exchange, and place making.  

Ottawa is not simply a city beside water—it is a city shaped by it. The Ottawa, Rideau, and Gatineau Rivers, together with the Rideau Canal, have influenced trade, industry, labour, infrastructure, and urban form for more than two centuries. Water is the city's original infrastructure and the enduring force that continues to shape how we live, move, and gather. It runs through every chapter of Ottawa's history, from the engineering achievement of the Rideau Canal to the working-class neighbourhoods that grew alongside its industrial economy. 

As the shoreline transformed from industrial edge to public realm, new bridges, beaches, docks, and places of immersion invite us to experience water not as a corridor of extraction, but as a shared civic space. Through thoughtful design, waterways that once divided neighbourhoods and bore the impacts of pollution are being reimagined as places that reconnect communities with one another and with the natural landscape. 

Architecture becomes the threshold between city and watershed, challenging us to rethink access, ecology, and responsibility. New forms of housing, mobility, and civic life are challenging us to reconsider how the city meets its landscape, its history, and its future. How can the currents of modern Bytown reveal, preserve, and reshape the built environment to celebrate the enduring influence of water in Ottawa's identity? 

Join us for this year's Ottawa Architecture Week as we explore this theme through tours, talks, exhibitions, installations, and conversations that celebrate the city, its waterways, and the ideas shaping its future.