Toni L. Griffin awarded the 2023 Special Recognition for Architecture, Design, and Urbanism by the SOM Foundation

The SOM Foundation has announced Toni L. Griffin as the recipient of their 2023 Special Recognition for Architecture, Design, and Urbanism. The award supports Griffin’s The Laboratory of the Future exhibition as part of the 2023 Venice Biennale.

The six-part exhibition includes 89 participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The participants, whose average age is 43, also hold a 50/50 gender balance. 70% of the exhibits are by practices run by an individual or very small team, reflecting what the SOM Foundation calls “a seismic change in the culture of architectural production at large and an even greater shift in participation in international exhibitions.”

Griffin, a Professor in the Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is also the founder of the New York-based urbanAC, a planning and design management practice that works with public, private, and nonprofit partnerships to reimagine, reshape, and rebuild just cities and communities. The practice’s complex and transformative social and spatial urban revitalization projects are rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and generation.

Beyond urbanAC, Griffin is the founder and director of the Just City Lab, an applied research platform that investigates the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities. She is the author of multiple articles on design justice and served as an Obama Presidential appointee to the US Commission on Fine Arts from 2016 to 2020.

“The Chicago-based work that Toni L. Griffin has been doing as part of her practice, urban American city, and the long-standing research of the Just City Lab platform she leads at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design has been remarkable,” SOM Foundation Executive Director Iker Gil said in a statement. “Her work provides invaluable and new portrayals of Chicago’s South Side and Black life.”

News of the award comes weeks after the SOM Foundation also announced the 2022 Research Prize and European Prize winners, as well as the three undergraduate winners of the 2022 Robert L. Wesley Award.