2014 AIA Institute Honor Awards recipients - Architecture

From a total of 500 submissions, the AIA selected 26 recipients around the globe to receive the 2014 Institute Honor Awards for excellency in architecture, interior architecture, and regional & urban design.

Three separate juries selected the recipients for each category. The recipients will be honored at the AIA 2014 National Convention and Design Exposition in Chicago in June.

Check out the list of winners in the Architecture category.

The Pierre; San Juan Island, Washington
Olson Kundig Architects

"A secure and unexpected retreat nestled into a rocky outcropping, The Pierre (French for stone) celebrates the materiality of its Pacific Northwest site. The house—composed of concrete, wood, steel and glass, and topped with a green roof—visually and physically merges with nature. Inside, rugged surfaces of rock periodically emerge into the space, contrasting with the refined textures of the furnishings. While one side of the house is hunkered into the site, the other overlooks the water, balancing the dual desires of prospect and refuge."

Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI) Campus; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
KPMB Architects 

"This project is located on a 3.9-acre site and is a reinterpretation of a traditional academic quad building based on the Oxford model. The client asked for a campus to last at least 100 years, a “vibrant sanctuary,” to facilitate reflection, collaboration, and discussion. The solution consists of two three-story, interconnected buildings and an auditorium pavilion organized around a courtyard. The scale, proportions and materials of the brick elevations facing the street are a direct response to the 19th-century masonry industrial buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. A limited palette of local limestone and brick masonry, wood and glass was used to create a serene atmosphere for study and reflection."

Lakewood Cemetery Garden Mausoleum; Minneapolis, Minnesota
HGA Architects and Engineers

"Addressing the intimacy of personal grieving and the shared rituals of commemoration, the design for the new Garden Mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis revisits an ancient building type whose setting demands contextual sensitivity and attention to materiality. The mausoleum minimizes the visual impact on its historic context by nestling more than three-quarters of the building into an existing south-facing hillside. In each crypt and columbarium room, daylight strengthens the relationship between the spiritual and the earth-bound while offering a serene and healing environment. The material palette--stone, bronze, wood and glass--calls upon visual and experiential senses while recalling centuries of memorial tradition."

Jackson Hole Airport; Jackson, Wyoming
Gensler 

"With respect to Teton National Park, The Jackson Hole Airport renovation and expansion considers the building as a simple, understated foreground feature intended to merely reside within the landscape. The queen-post trusses reduced beam depths, increasing the volume, allowing for an expansive glass curtain wall that reinforces the connection between interior and exterior. This LEED Silver Certified airport distinguishes itself from the aesthetics of typical airports because of its regional design approach, materiality, and intimate scale. The airport serves as passenger’s first and last impression to this truly unique region."

SCAD Museum of Art; Savannah, Georgia
Sottile & Sottile and Lord Aeck Sargent in association with Dawson Architects

"Resurrecting the ruins of the nation’s only surviving antebellum railroad complex, the Savannah College of Art and Design transformed a National Historic Landmark. The design process emphasized an artistically manual approach, honoring the humanity and integrity of the site’s heritage. Ruins were integrated within a contemporary concrete structure, preserving and highlighting the historic materials as a fundamental part of the new architecture. With its galleries, art studios, classrooms, theater, public gardens, and vibrant streetscape, this new civic landmark stands as a center of intellectual exchange, artistic discovery, and urban evolution."

2014 Institute Honor Award - architecture: Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center; Brooklyn, New York
WEISS/MANFREDI

"The Brooklyn Botanic Garden Visitor Center is an inhabitable topography defining a threshold between the city and the garden, culture and cultivation. Nested into an existing berm, the LEED Gold building is a seamless extension of the garden path system, framing views through the historic garden. As a chameleon-like structure, the visitor center transitions from an architectural presence at the street into a structured landscape in the botanic garden. The building redefines the physical and philosophical relationship between visitor and garden, introducing new connections between landscape and structure, exhibition and movement."

St. Louis Public Library, Central Library Transformation and Restoration; St. Louis, Missouri
Cannon Design

"St. Louis Public Library’s Central Library, designed by Cass Gilbert, fills a city block in the center of downtown St. Louis. The transformation of the 3-story 1912 Beaux Arts structure focused on the north wing, replacing multistory, non-public book stacks with a new “building within the building” for public use. Now light filled and welcoming to its urban neighbors, the north wing is a new entrance surrounded by upper stories of books visible to all. The original entry and public rooms are restored and revitalized, continuing their active use as a vibrant public resource."

King Street Station; Seattle, Washington
ZGF Architects LLP

"The rehabilitation of King Street Station restores historic 1906 architectural finishes, re-establishes the station as a modern transportation hub and capitalizes on materials and energy invested a century ago by reusing materials rather than replacing them. The project enhances public spaces, improves pedestrian and multi-modal connections in and around the station, and has served as a catalyst for additional redevelopment within the neighborhood. Securing the station for the future, the rehabilitation also included significant seismic and structural updates to improve the building’s safety and durability. The project has achieved LEED Platinum certification."

New Boathouse for Community Rowing, Inc. (CRI); Boston, Massachusetts
Anmahian Winton Architects 

"This is the first permanent facility for Community Rowing, the largest public rowing organization in the country. The project is composed of two buildings that form a courtyard that overlays two typically incompatible conditions: a public forecourt to the river and a staging terrace for the boats. The small building, a glass-shingled pavilion for single shells, displays the boats to the adjacent parkway. The large building houses longer boats, offices, and training rooms. The unique kinetic cladding system, which regulates natural ventilation and light, literally transforms the shape of the building and its relationship to the surrounding landscape."

Quaker Meeting House and Arts Center, Sidwell Friends School; Washington; D.C. KieranTimberlake 

"With a minimum of means, this project transforms a non-descript 1950s gymnasium into a Quaker Meeting House and Arts Center serving the entire middle and upper school community at Sidwell Friends School. The building program includes a worship space, visual art and music rooms, and exhibition areas. The essence of Quaker Meeting, and thus the Meeting House itself, is silence and light. Architecturally this is achieved by filtering light and sound through architecture, landscape, structure, and systems arranged in successive concentric layers around a central source of illumination, both literal and spiritual."

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; Los Angeles, California
Belzberg Architects 

"The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is submerged into the surrounding public park space allowing the landscape to continue over the structure. Pathways are morphed onto the building and appropriated as surface patterning. The museum emerges from the landscape as a single, curving concrete wall that splits and carves into the ground to form the entry. Entry to the building entails a gradual deterioration of this visual and auditory connection to the park while descending a long ramp. Inside visitors experience a series of isolated spaces saturated with interactive archival content with diminishing natural light while descending further into the earth."


The 2014 AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture jury included: Scott Wolf, FAIA (Chair), The Miller Hull Partnership LLP; Natalye Appel, FAIA, Natalye Appel + Associates Architects; Mary Brush, AIA, Brush Architects, LLC; Joy Coleman, AIA, Treanor Architects; Robert M. Hon, AIAS Student Representative; Brenda A. Levin, FAIA, Levin & Associates Architects; Michael J. Mills, FAIA, Mills + Schnoering Architects, LLC; G. Martin Moeller, Assoc. AIA, National Building Museum and Ed Soltero, AIA, Arizona State University.