2016 Honor Awards
SEATTLE, November 8, 2016 – The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Seattle chapter hosted the annual Honor Awards for Washington Architecture on November 7th to celebrate excellence in design. Award-winning projects, announced at a packed event at Benaroya Hall, served as powerful demonstrations of the outstanding caliber of design that is consistently produced by Washington-based architects and designers.
The distinguished jury included Mimi Hoang AIA (nARCHITECTS, New York) and Anna Dyson (CASE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York). The event was moderated by Gundula Proksch, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Co-Chairs for the 2016 AIA Seattle Honor Awards were Kailin Gregga Assoc. AIA & JoAnn Wilcox AIA.
From over 140 submittals, the jury chose sixteen award winners from two categories – built and conceptual. This year also saw the inauguration of the Energy in Design Award to commend projects that have made quantifiably significant strides in energy reduction while also maintaining the highest qualitative design caliber. Across the spectrum of project types, the jury acknowledged the strong design culture represented by both the breadth and quality of submitted projects, and applauded the winners for their conceptual rigor, clarity of design, functionality and discourse with the client base. The Awards of Honor in particular were projects that went above and beyond in terms of conceptual rigor – surprising the jury with their dogged tenacity of how they went about thinking about their program building type. All three rise to the level of innovation on multiple levels.
AWARD OF HONOR
Northwood Elementary School by Mahlum Architects is an innovative and thoughtfully design school on Mercer Island. This project was the “highlight of the trip” for the jury, who felt it was “incredibly rigorous without being dogmatic, inventively weaving program spaces and scales of spaces in and out of one another.” The jury acknowledged “how difficult it can be, given a relatively tight budget, to be so incredibly consistent in the materials, while also being so agile” and felt “the space was perfectly scaled to kids, and masterful in terms of thinking about how children learn and play.”
Martin’s Lane Winery by Olson Kundig is a courageous and bold winery project in Kelowna, British Columbia. The jury felt this project “stood out because of its concise and precise way it intervened on the land – embedded and light-footed simultaneously, while mimicking the slope of the land. With just a few very simple moves, this project retained a tremendous organization and clarity of the program in relationship to the forms and the site.”
Innovative Workplace Environment Inspired by Context at NorthEdge by Perkins+Will is an ambitious speculative office building in N. Lake Union, Seattle, WA. The jury was impressed by the “thoughtfulness in this building’s siting and interior/exterior experience.” The jury was equally impressed with “how the policy of needing to maintain sightlines through to the water dictated elements of the design, necessitating a courtyard type – a perfect marriage of what the design team had to do and refreshing, edgy and pure form. It was an environmentally and urbanistically sensitive project.”
ENERGY IN DESIGN AWARD
The Bullitt Center by The Miller Hull Partnership on Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA was chosen as the inaugural Energy in Design Award to commend projects that have made quantifiably significant strides in energy reduction while also maintaining the highest qualitative design caliber. The jury was incredibly impressed with the performance of this building and the breadth of environmental impacts and consumption this project considers. The Bullitt Center is “a beacon for its immediate, dense urban community, as well as for the design community at large, as to how you not just look at metrics of a building’s performance, but also how people fundamentally interact with a building in a more sustainable way.”
AWARD OF MERIT
Washington Fruit & Produce Co. Office Headquarters by Graham Baba Architects
Train Station by LMN Architects
Niamey 2000 Urban Housing by united4design
Lightbox by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
HONORABLE MENTION
Doppler Building at Amazon in the Regrade by NBBJ
Allen Institute for Brain Science Inspires Transformative Design for Research by Perkins+Will
CLTHouse by atelierjones
Chophouse Row by Sundberg Kennedy Ly Au Young Architects in collaboration with Graham Baba Architects
Lake Sammamish State Park Bathhouse by Patano Studio Architecture
Carved from Color + Musical Movement by GGLO
CONCEPTUAL
Civil War Memorial by Metrica LLC (Award of Merit)
MAP THE SQUARE by Young Architects Forum (Honorable Mention)
To view all of the 2016 submissions, visit the Online Gallery.
