Steven Holl Architects Wins Three Awards at AIA NY 2008 Awards

New York City, March 19 2007 — Steven Holl Architects has been awarded three awards for the 2008 Design and Building Type Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, completed in June 2007, won the Architecture Honor Award for being ‘unique and exemplary in its originality’. Previously the addition to The Nelson-Atkins Museum has been honored with several other prestigious awards including the 2008 AIA Institute Honor Award, the New Built Award by LEAF London, the AIA Central States Award for Excellence in Architecture, the AIA Kansas Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture and five AIA Kansas City Awards for Craftsmanship.

For the first time this year, the AIA New York Chapter has established an additional set of awards to recognize quality and advancement in the specialized design fields of Educational Facility Design, Sustainable Design and Urban Design, collectively known as “The Building Type Awards.” Steven Holl Architects won awards in the first two categories. The NYU Department of Philosophy in New York (completed in September 2007) was awarded in the Educational Facility Design Category, and the Linked Hybrid in Beijing (expected to be completed this year) won a prize for its Sustainable Design.

Steven Holl states: ‘We are delighted to see that two of the themes that are most important to our designs of the past decades, sustainability and inspirational architecture for education, have been recognized by the AIA New York Chapter for their quality and creativity.’

The 30,000 square feet interior design for the Department of Philosophy at NYU in an 1890 building at 3-5 Washington Place is organized around a concept of the phenomenal properties of light and materials. A new porous stair, changing its direction slightly at each floor, vertically connects the six-level building through shifting light and shadow and is designed to encourage social interaction.

For the Linked Hybrid, an urban space of eight towers that are linked at the twentieth floor by a ring of public facilities, Steven Holl Architects aims at the highest standards for sustainable design. The pedestrian-oriented combination of public and private space encourages the use of shared resource es and reduces the need for wasteful modes of transit. It is an urban oasis, proving that peaceful, green spaces can exist in an exploding metropolis such as Beijing. An estimated 220,000 liters of gray water from all apartment units will be recycled each day and reused for landscape and green roof irrigation, toilet flushing, and rebalancing pond water. Linked Hybrid’s ground source heat pump system, one of the largest in residential construction, is its most groundbreaking innovation. Shouldering 70% of the complex’s yearly heating and cooling load, the system is comprised of 660 geothermal wells, 100 meters below the basement foundation.

The winning projects from both the Design Awards and the Building Type Awards will be recognized at the annual Design Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, April 30th. All work will be exhibited at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place. The Design Awards Exhibition runs from Thursday, May 1st through July 2008.