AIA Seattle Announces 2021 Honorees

Each year, AIA Seattle recognizes leadership and achievement in design and the built environment through its honors program.

Honorees are nominated by their peers and selected by the Fellows & Honors committee each spring. AIA Seattle is delighted to recognize these recipients for their exceptional achievements and to showcase the diversity of professionals who make our region’s design community so purposeful and beautiful. Please join us in congratulating the 2021 Honorees!

Individual Awardees Celebration Monday, November 8 at Town Hall Seattle

This year, we are excited to recognize and celebrate our individual awardees for their outstanding contributions to the profession and our community at the Individual Awardees Celebration on Monday, November 8 at Town Hall Seattle.

Individual Awardees Celebration | Town Hall Seattle’s Forum

4:30pm – Doors Open for Individual Awardees Celebration (Forum Entrance off Seneca St)
- Bar opens (21+)
5:15pm – Individual Awardees Celebration Begins | Town Hall Seattle’s Forum
6:30pm – Program Ends
- Those also attending the Honor Awards Live Event will make their way to the lobby

Interested in continuing the night with us at the Honor Awards for Washington Architecture Live Event? Learn more and get tickets here.

2021 HONOREES

Gold Medal

Anne Schopf FAIA

Anne Schopf FAIA has been recognized, over her 37-year career, with more than 80 international, national, regional, and local design awards, including four AIA COTE Top Ten Awards. Anne joined Mahlum Nordfors McKinley Gordon in 1990 and became Design Partner in 2004, helping to transform the practice into a Design First Firm. She continues to drive the firm’s vision of creating healthy and sustainable environments for the communities they serve. Elevated to Fellow of the Institute under Category 1 Design, Anne was awarded the Medal of Honor from AIA Northwest Pacific Region in 2013, and under her leadership, Mahlum received the AIA NWPR Firm Award in 2014.

Anne’s deep commitment to design excellence and building performance has led her to participate at a national AIA leadership level with both the Committee on the Environment and the Committee on Design. With the aim to transform the culture of design into one that examines environmental performance and social impact as an imperative, Anne has driven performance metrics into design awards programs nationwide through the development of the Common App, sparking local AIA Components and Knowledge Communities to incorporate performance metrics as a part of their submission and jurying process. Anne has also successfully sponsored over 25 international architects for elevation to Honorary FAIA. In Seattle, Anne served as Chair of the Honor Awards program, previously sat on the Board of Directors, participated in numerous committees, and served as AIA Seattle’s President in 2010.

Young Architect Award

Chris Hellstern AIA

Chris is the Living Building Challenge Services Director, architect and author with The Miller Hull Partnership in Seattle with a variety of project experience including five certified Living Buildings and several more currently in design. Chris has dedicated his career to progressing sustainability within the built environment. Having completed numerous projects including public and private facilities he works with teams to initiate, plan and coordinate the execution of sustainable goals ranging from Zero Energy certification to Living Building Challenge Certified projects.

His book, Living Building Education, chronicles the story behind his first Living Building, the Bertschi School. Chris founded the Seattle 2030 Roundtable and co-founded the Healthy Materials Collaborative. A Living Future Accredited professional and a Living Building Challenge Hero, Chris is a university guest lecturer and speaker at numerous conferences across the country. He works on state and local environmental policy with AIA Washington, publishes articles and volunteers with local school groups mentoring students about sustainable practices and advocacy. As an Affiliate Instructor with the University of Washington, Chris teaches a graduate sustainability course for the College of Built Environments.

Margaret Knight AIA

Margaret is a licensed architect in the state of Washington, has served on AIA Seattle’s Board of Directors, and is a past chair of AIA Seattle’s Diversity Roundtable (DRT). As a woman of color, Margaret is passionate about encouraging and promoting diversity within the architectural profession.

Following her graduation from Cornell University, Margaret conducted participatory design workshops in Kenya, to create productive public spaces outside of Nairobi. Since joining Schemata Workshop in 2015, Margaret has worked on several community-focused projects centered around EDI issues impacting Seattle area communities. From affordable housing projects to neighborhood design guidelines in Seattle’s Central Area and Chinatown-International District, Margaret is passionate about the role community engagement can play in the design process, especially in communities of color. She believes that representation matters, and has focused her efforts outside of the office on exposing minority youth to the design profession through Architects in Schools programming, Hip Hop Architecture camps, and Sawhorse Revolution collaborations. Margaret speaks publicly about the power of community engagement and the importance of diversity, and strives to incorporate these themes in all of the work that she does.

Honorary AIA Seattle Membership

Jennifer Guthrie FASLA, PLA

Jennifer Guthrie is a founding partner of GGN and a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Jennifer’s design leadership merges a guiding, experiential vision with innovative and precise detailing. Her work ranges broadly, encompassing urban districts of green streets and mixed-use housing, public squares, rooftop gardens, urban farms, and cultural institutions. Examples of these diverse project types include the University of Washington’s West Campus Residences & Streetscape, the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park in Chicago, the Spring District in Bellevue, and the Long Beach Civic Center in California.

GGN was the recipient of the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award. Additionally, Jennifer and her partners received the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture in 2011. Jennifer’s work has received numerous national and regional Honor Awards from ASLA and AIA. She is a former President of the Landscape Architectural Foundation Board and she currently serves on the CEO Roundtable.

Kristine Kenney ASLA, LEED AP

University Landscape Architect & Director of Campus Planning + Architecture
University of Washington

Kristine is an accomplished and dedicated steward of the University of Washington campus, where she directs the planning and physical development of the built environment, both inside and out. With a strong commitment to solving complex issues through creative solutions, Kristine is adept at strategically navigating and cultivating cross-functional discourse amongst campus leaders, trade experts, and design professionals to effectively balance limited resources with unlimited ambitions. Throughout her career, she has been recognized by her peers with professional awards commending the positive and inclusive culture she fosters, resulting in high-impact, results-oriented teams. Within the design profession, she has earned great respect for her tenacious advocacy and encouragement to continually strive for design excellence, resulting in numerous project design awards at the University of Washington. One of her proudest accomplishments is the vision and insight she provided over a ten-year timeframe, resulting in the reenvisioned lower Rainer Vista, an iconic and campus-defining landscape. In her free time, Kristine enjoys relishing in the seasonal beauty of the Pacific Northwest, whether that’s getting her hands dirty in the garden or actively immersing herself in nature with family and friends.

Nicole DeNamur WELL AP

Nicole DeNamur is an attorney, WELL AP and Faculty, Fitwel Ambassador, EcoDistricts AP and LEED Green Associate. She helps her clients identify and manage the risks of sustainable innovation so they can do great work without the surprises. Before launching her consulting company – Sustainable Strategies – Nicole practiced construction and insurance coverage law in the Seattle area for more than a decade. She leverages this experience to guide her clients as they pursue robust sustainability goals, and her strength lies in her ability to view sustainability issues through a legal and risk management lens.

Nicole’s work focuses on creating collaborative spaces and uniting diverse groups to mitigate climate change through the built environment. She also specializes in issues related to the intersection of buildings with human health and wellness. Nicole is particularly focused on creating safe, accessible and inclusive spaces that allow all occupants to thrive. In addition to her consulting work, Nicole is an award-winning contributing author and has developed and taught graduate-level courses at the University of Washington and Boston Architectural College.

Tory Laughlin-Taylor

Tory Laughlin Taylor is a real estate advisor in affordable housing development, engaged in organizations and strategies that leverage values-driven capital to deliver enduring affordability in our Puget Sound communities. For over three decades she has been financing, building and operating multi-family housing for low-income working people, driven by the conviction that economic access to desirable housing is the foundation of a healthy equitable society. In her career she has originated over 1,000 units of permanently affordable housing for people earning about half of median income.

A Seattle native, Tory has a BA from Harvard College and an MBA in Real Estate Finance and Development from George Washington University. She has served on the Seattle Design Commission, the Seattle Housing Levy Oversight Committee, and the Washington State Affordable Housing Advisory Board.

Community Service Award

Kate Simonen AIA, SE

Kate Simonen, AIA, SE is the executive director of the Carbon Leadership Forum and Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. Connecting significant professional experience in high performance building design and technical expertise in environmental life cycle assessment she works to spur collective action to bring net embodied carbon to zero through cutting-edge research, cross-sector collaboration, and the incubation of new approaches. Kate directs the research of the Carbon Leadership Forum and convenes collaborative initiatives such as the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (the EC3 tool) and the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge.

Allied Organization Award

Sawhorse Revolution

Founded in 2010, Sawhorse Revolution fosters confident, community-oriented youth through the power of carpentry and craft. We are inspired to create equitable change within a framework of “feet-on-the-ground” education and job-training, empowerment, and leadership, in and for our community. Sawhorse programs team teens with professional carpenters and architects to build and design projects that make a real difference in their community. We partner with schools and low-income housing organizations in central and south Seattle to ensure our free programs reach youth furthest from educational justice – so that they can make a real difference in their own neighborhoods. To date, Sawhorse students have built 58 structures, partnered with 100+ community groups, and Sawhorse has served over 800 youth in Central and South Seattle. The structures we build with our students stand as testaments to the long-term benefit of our programs; these projects can be anything from a series of projects built for BIPOC-led food justice organizations, to 25+ tiny homes for the homeless placed in city-sanctioned encampments, to a 225 sq. ft social justice lending library. By responding to a variety of local needs, we give students leadership and agency in their own communities, allowing them to apply their creativity collaboratively to change the worlds around them.