“Inventing is a combination of brains and materials. The more brains you use, the less material you need.”
-- Charles Kettering

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call for entries

The vision of this year’s honor awards – improv \ improve – celebrates the agility, inventiveness and foresight we bring to our work in this era of change. Today we transcend professional boundaries to improve design and solve urgent problems.

IMPROV: Design for change requires us to quickly react to new constraints with creative and delightful solutions – improv! We roll up our sleeves and work together often breaking new ground seeking smart, responsible design solutions.

IMPROVE: Improve is the mindset for transforming ourselves and bettering our surroundings, above and beyond the scope of each project.

We invite you to submit your most creative solutions and resourceful projects to celebrate design excellence in these exciting and challenging times. It is time for small projects with big impacts and big projects with small footprints. Some projects are built, others are on paper, but all awaiting their chance to tell their story, spark conversation and inspire action by example. This year’s engaging jury and compelling moderator will lead a vivid and provocative conversation about the elegance and sustainability of our region’s architectural work.

Chairs, AIA Seattle 2009 Honor Awards
Don Miles, FAIA
Shannon Nichol, ASLA, RPA

categories

ENVISIONED: Recognizes explorations, concepts, and potential with the field of architecture.
REALIZED: Recognizes built work and the challenges inherent in realizing an architectural idea.

key dates

• September 21, 2009: Early Registration deadline
• October 6, 2009: Submittal deadline
• November 9: Awards presentation at Benaroya Hall, Seattle

why submit?

• All entries are available online prior to the awards presentation.
• Awarded projects will be featured in an upcoming feature in Forum, AIA Seattle’s quarterly magazine sent to over 4,000 AIA members
• Submitted projects to the Honor Awards are also submitted to the Project of the Month program through the Daily Journal of Commerce.
• Editors and writers interested in architecture and the built environment also take note of the Honor Awards website, which received 13,000 page visits during the 2008 Honor
• Awards season.
• Our 2008 Honor Awards website generated dozens of earned media articles, both locally and nationally.

AIA Seattle’s Annual Honor Awards program provides an important opportunity for the design community to take stock of the state of architectural design, sharing its achievements both among practitioners and with the community-at-large. Winning an award is one benefit of submitting a project, but the opportunity to display the work and engage in dialogue with colleagues is equally important. AIA Seattle is committed to exhibiting all of the work submitted, at the awards event, on its website and in other ways that create a connection between architects and the community.

jury

Nigel Dancey, RIBA Foster + Partners, London

Nigel Dancey joined Foster + Partners in 1990, becoming involved in numerous competitions including Jiushi Tower, Shanghai. His early built projects include Yaraicho; a pair of office buildings in Tokyo, Japan and projects for Samsung Motors in Seoul, Korea. He was subsequently project architect for the Joslyn Art Museum addition in Omaha, Nebraska – Foster + Partners’ first building in the United States. He has lately led his team on a number of competition winning schemes that are now being realized, including the Seattle Civic Centre, the Huadu Hotel competition in China and Al Faisaliah II, a new mixed-use tower in Riyadh.

He has been awarded an Honorary Senior Fellowship by the Design Futures Council and became an executive director of the practice and a member of design board in 2007, to which he brings to bear a particular expertise in the social agenda, concentrating on a broad cross-section of the practice’s work.

Mark Rios, FAIA, FASLA, Rios Clementi Hale, Los Angeles

Founding Principal, Mark has been the leader of both the design and the business direction of Rios Clementi Hale Studios since establishing the firm in 1985. He has built a practice that has an award-winning tradition across an unprecedented range of design disciplines. Mark is an Associate Professor at the USC School of Architecture and Director of the Landscape Architecture Department. His continued focus is on the quality of the design work, as the scale and complexity of the firms projects grow.

Teddy Cruz, eStudio Cruz, San Diego

Teddy Cruz’ work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. Teddy’ Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He has recently received the 2004-05 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize and is currently an Associate Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.

moderator

Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, University of Virginia

Elizabeth K. Meyer is one of the leading landscape architectural theorists in the United States. She has lectured at universities on four continents, and published widely on topics concerning contemporary landscape design practice and theory, such as Site Citations: Grounding the Modern Landscape in Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn’s Site Matters and The Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values into Landscape Design in Michel Conan’s Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. Her writings provocatively question conventional norms and assumptions. In Uncertain Parks. Disturbed Sites, Citizens and a Risk Society, Meyer explores the social implications and aesthetic conundrums inherent in the making of new parks on toxic industrial sites. In Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance, she calls for the insertion of aesthetic concerns into a sustainability agenda arguing that without them sustainable design will have a limited impact on the environmental practices and ethics of the public. More on Elizabeth here.


2009 honor awards co-chairs

Shannon Nichol RLA, ASLA, LEED AP

Shannon Nichol's site-specific landscape designs can be found in cities throughout the world. Shannon's clear, distinct concepts have inspired and unified complex, interdisciplinary projects, from rooftop parks to neighborhood masterplans. Her work has been widely recognized for its fluent relationship with distinctive architectural contexts and for incorporating high intensities of use into fluidly cohesive environments.

Shannon is a founding partner of Gustafson Guthrie Nichol. Recent examples of Shannon's work as Design Partner may be found in such projects as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation campus, Chicago's Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, Boston's North End Parks, and the McCaw Hall Opera House in Seattle. Shannon regularly serves on design-award juries for national and local chapters of the ASLA and AIA. She has held positions on several appointed boards, including design-advisory committees for Seattle's historic 1962 World's Fair campus (Seattle Center).

Don Miles FAIA

Don Miles is a principal and director of urban design at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects in Seattle. Don has over 35 years of experience as an architect and urban designer. He has specialized in public and commercial facilities, community development guide plans, and historic preservation. He is a frequent lecturer, has been a consultant to numerous cities and business people throughout the country, and is a published author and analyst of design issues relating buildings to their external environments. Don is a founding board member of Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit corporation based in New York. Its objective is to improve the relationship between the design of public areas and the way people use them.

many thanks to our 2009 honor awards sponsors

GOLD

SILVER
ABKJ Inc.
Affiliated Engineers NW
Arup
The Blue Book of Building and Construction
Cary Kopczynski & Company
Clothier & Head
Coffman Engineers, Inc.
Copiers Northwest, Inc.
Coughlin Porter Lundeen
Glacier Stone Supply
Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd.
Imaginit Technologies
Inn at the Market
KPFF Consulting Engineers
Magnusson Klemencic Associates
McGraw - Hill
Nucor Steel
PCS Structural Solutions
Schirmer Engineering Corporation
Schultz Miller
Stantec
Turner Construction

SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS
Gustafson Guthrie Nichol
Knoll
Meyer Wells
Sellen Construction
Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects