2021 Honor Awards | Final Submission Deadline

Reconnect and broaden conversations about resilience in design. On behalf of the Honor Awards Committee, we look forward to celebrating you in person with a renewed sense of urgency to undertake the grand social, environmental, and economic challenges we are facing. 

While this has been a difficult year, it has also been a time for reflection. Our evolving public health crises, continued critical reckonings with systemic racism, and rapidly changing environments are intrinsically linked. Yet we remain optimistic in the innovations design can contribute, and believe in AIA Seattle’s vision for a culture of design that fosters equitable, resilient, and thriving communities.   

You play a vital role in showcasing the design leadership in our region, and we encourage you to share your work by submitting to AIA Seattle’s 2021 Honor Awards for Washington Architecture. It’s a new year, a new jury, and a transition back to in person celebrations!   

• This year’s live event on November 8 will return to an in-person celebration of our greater design community, recognizing both project teams and — for the first time — individual awardees. Components of the program will be shared virtually, enabling us to extend these celebrations to broader audiences. 
• As a part of the submissions form, AIA Seattle is continuing use of the Common App for Design Excellence in the Energy in Design Award evaluation. This tool is a natural evolution of the Energy in Design Calculator, and an exciting opportunity for all built submissions to move toward design that supports climate action.   
• The challenges of this past year and those that lie ahead have illuminated the importance of community and locality. This year, we encourage submitters to celebrate the people and place the project effects. This includes highlighting community impacts, emphasizing resiliency, describing the project’s benefits to both local and broader communities, and celebrating the project teams that contribute to visioning and building these projects. 

• In order to build a resilient future, it is important to take risks. Research provides safe testing grounds to engage with the extraordinary challenges and crises we face that will ultimately push practice forward. Now in its fourth year, we highly encourage submissions to the Research & Innovation category that highlight discoveries, experimentation, explorations, successes, and even failures from which we can learn and grow. 

If you have never submitted before or your project has not yet been recognized, this is your moment to reconnect and contribute to broadening conversations about resilience in design. Download the 2021 Call for Submissions + Guidelines. 

– Ming-Lee Yuan, AIA & Catherine De Almeida, ASLA | Co-chairs, Honor Awards Committee 

Finalize submission + complete payment before the final submission deadline, 5:00pm PDT, September 29, 2021! Visit the 2021 Honor Awards page for more information.