2009 Great Places Awards Announce Seven Winners

Seven projects have been named winners of the 2009 Great Places Awards. The Great Places Awards reflect the related missions of the program’s sponsors: Places, the Environmental Design Research Association, and Metropolis magazine.

Design Awards (for completed projects that demonstrate excellence as human environments) were given to:

The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, Oslo, Norway
Snøhetta (Project Architects: Craig Dykers, Tarald Lundevall, Kjetil Traedal Thorsen)

Wing Luke Asian Museum, Seattle, WA (more on this project here)
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects (Rick Sundberg, Principal in Charge; Stephen Yamada-Heidner, Project Manager)

Planning Awards (for projects that make proposals for the future design, use, or management of a place) were given to:

Vision 2030: West Dallas Gateway, Strategic Framework Initiative
Univ. of Texas, Dallas Urban Laboratory, Dean J. Almy, Director

Guangming Sustainable Park, Shenzen, China
CJ Lim, Studio 8 Architects

Resuscitating the Fez River: Procedures to Create New Public Space in the Medina of Fez
Takako Tajima, Aziza Chaouni, Bureau E.A.S.T.

A Research Award (for projects that investigate the relationship between design and human behavior, culture or experience) was given to:

Design for Health
University of Minnesota, Cornell University, University of Colorado. Phase 1 core team: Dr. Ann Forsyth, Dr. Kevin Krizek, Dr. Carissa Schively Slotterback, Amanda Johnson, Aly Pennucci, Michael Huber

The Book Award (for a recently published book advancing the critical understanding of place and the design of exceptional environments) was given to:

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, by Anne Whiston Spirn; published in 2008 by the University of Chicago Press

Awards will be presented in May at EDRA’s 40th annual meeting, in Kansas City, Missouri. Winning projects and commentary will be published in the Fall 2009 issue of Places.

Judging for the twelfth annual cycle of the awards (formerly known as the EDRA/Places Awards) was held Feb. 27-28 at the University of Texas, Austin, School of Architecture. The jurors were:

David Lake, Principal, Lake/Flato Architects, San Antonio, Texas

Elizabeth Macdonald, Professor of City and Regional Planning and Urban Design, University of California, Berkeley

Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Principal, Rahul Mehrotra Associates, Mumbai, India

Lawrence Speck, Professor of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin; Principal, PageSoutherlandPage, Austin, Texas

William Sullivan, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Images: Great Places Awards