AIA Seattle Announces 2018 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 contributions to the profession and our community.

Please join us in congratulating the 2018 Honorees! We will celebrate their achievements at the 2018 President’s Dinner on Saturday June 30, 2018 at Palace Ballroom in Seattle.

2018 HONOREES

AIA Seattle Gold Medal

Tom Kundig FAIA

Tom Kundig is a principal and owner of Seattle-based Olson Kundig. Over the past three decades, Kundig has received some of the world’s highest design honors, including a National Design Award for Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Kundig was inducted into Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame and in 2016, he was elected to the National Academy as an Academician in Architecture. Under his leadership, Olson Kundig received the 2009 National AIA Architecture Firm Award (as Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects), was a recipient of the 2004 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, and has twice been named one of the Top Ten Most Innovative Companies in Architecture by Fast Company. In total, Kundig’s work has received over 60 awards from the American Institute of Architects, including ten National Honor Awards and ten National Housing Awards. In 2018, Kundig’s Sawmill project received an AIA COTE Top Ten Award and an AIA National Small Project Award. Kundig’s Shinsegae International received the World Architecture News Tall Buildings Award in 2017, and his Meg Home, Rolling Huts and Delta Shelter projects have all received Record House Awards from Architectural Record. The Pierre was named the World Architecture News House of the Year in 2010. Kundig’s work has appeared in hundreds of publications worldwide and on the covers of The New York Times magazine, ARCHITECT, Architectural Record, and Architectural Digest. Kundig’s work can be found on five continents, in locations ranging from Costa Rica to Brazil, New Zealand, China, Mexico and Sweden. Kundig regularly lectures and serves on design juries around the world, and is named in The Wallpaper* 150 as a key individual who has influenced, inspired and improved the way we live, work and travel. In 2011, Princeton Architectural Press released Tom Kundig: Houses 2, the follow-up to the 2006 book, Tom Kundig Houses. Both books have become the Press’s best-selling architecture books of all time. His third monograph, Tom Kundig: Works, was released in November 2015; by January 2016, the first print run of 7,500 copies was sold out and in 2018 the book is currently on its third reprint. The international success of all three of Kundig’s monographs is another testament to his worldwide reach and influence on both architectural practitioners and design-minded audiences.

Young Architect Award

JoAnn Wilcox AIA

JoAnn Hindmarsh Wilcox AIA, LEED AP, has committed her professional practice to exploring architecture’s emerging relationship to social and ecological possibilities – not just solutions – that uplift the next generation. Specializing in design for learning, her built work highlights a balance between persistent curiosity and a quiet sensitivity to place, craft and the human experience. Manifested through: spatial and functional exploration; transdisciplinary collaboration; rigorous resolution; and the cultivation of positive social interaction through design within the public realm. Noted for creating buildings as deeply impactful as beautiful, her work has been awarded for design excellence from the local to the international level. JoAnn is a Principal, Design Lead and Public Engagement Strategist at Mahlum, on the leadership team of the firm’s K-12 Studio. Additionally, JoAnn volunteers, juries, teaches, critiques, facilitates, publishes and lectures widely; engaging civic issues that speak to the transformational power of design for social equity and environmental wellbeing.

Honorary AIA Seattle Membership

Lindsey Pflugrath

Lindsey is a construction law attorney with Cairncross & Hempelmann. Her clients include owners, owner’s representatives, contractors, multi-disciplinary design firms, and engineering and architecture firms. Lindsey has devoted her career to understanding the risks faced by design and construction professionals, working together with her clients to manage those risks, while encouraging growth and innovation in their practices. Her practice is thoroughly integrated with her clients’ projects; she provides counsel on contract negotiation, project delivery, budget and schedule constraints, payment disputes, and post-completion claims. Lindsey is very proud to have served as a three-term member of the Board of Directors at the AIA, and to have participated on the Practice & Ethics and Women in Design Committees, the Center for Architecture and Design Executive Committee and many other exciting AIA initiatives. Lindsey is also active with ACEC, ULI, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Seattle Architecture Foundation.

Peter Orser

Peter is best known for his work with Quadrant Homes where he served for almost 25 years, helping to bring Quadrant to prominence as Washington’s leading homebuilder, serving as President until 2010 when he assumed the role of CEO of the Weyerhaeuser Real Estate Company where he oversaw five different homebuilding operations across the Country until 2014 when Weyerhaeuser completed the successful sale of the Company, at which point Peter “retired”. In his retirement Peter served as the acting Director for the Runstad Department for Real Estate Studies and upon a successful search for the permanent Director, now serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board.. He currently serves on the Governor’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board and since July of 2016 has been a member of the Rainier Prep Charter School Board of Directors. Peter also serves as a Director for Beazer Homes, a national Public home builder and on the Advisory Board of Seabrook a Washington coastal resort community. Peter’s civic commitments have also been diverse. He has been Chairman of the King County Housing Authority, President of the King and Snohomish County Master Builders Association, Chairman of Forterra and a board and Executive Committee member for the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. He also served as Chair of the Mercer Island planning commission and was elected to a four-year term on the City Council in 1994.

Community Service Award

Facing Homelessness

By reaching out to ‘Just Say Hello’ we begin the process of turning a stranger into a friend. Facing Homelessness invites community into the task of ending homelessness by bringing people closer in relationship, we do this with the understanding that healthy community does not accept homelessness. Our Facebook page shares b&w photos and stories of those living outside as means for highlighting the beauty of each person, inviting us to reach out. Over the last eight years, every need posted has been answered by this compassionate community. The BLOCK Project places a 125 sq ft home in residential backyards, providing an off-grid self-sufficient and dignified place to call home for someone formerly living outside. The BLOCK Project, originated by architects Jenn LaFreniere and Rex Hohlbein, partners at BLOCK Architects, and now managed by Facing Homelessness, unleashes the power of community by revealing that we each have a role in ending homelessness.

Allied Organization Award

Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment

The Office of Sustainability & Environment (OSE) partners with the community to create strategies to help us achieve shared environmental goals. OSE coordinates among City departments, the Mayor’s Office, and City Council to ensure successful implementation these strategies. They integrate equity by elevating opportunities to increase racial, social, and environmental justice throughout Seattle’s environmental work. OSE is leading the way to a sustainable and carbon neutral Seattle. They focus our efforts in three areas: Meeting the Climate Challenge; Championing Environmental Equity; and Growing Sustainable Communities.

Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship

Laura Bartunek Assoc. AIA,

Laura is an Associate at Olson Kundig, where she first joined the firm as an intern in 2011. She is known for her interest in imaginative and exploratory architecture, which has informed her work on such cultural projects as Zooraji, a rooftop garden located above a nine-story department store in Daegu, South Korea. This project also reflects Laura’s continued interest in landscape – both real and imagined, micro and macro – as a point of departure for design investigations. She is currently working on the design of Checkmate Winery, a winery renovation in British Columbia by Olson Kundig Principal/Owner Tom Kundig. This coming spring Laura will also be co-teaching the studio ‘Design Dialogues’ at the University of Washington with Olson Kundig Principals Edward Lalonde and Mark Olthoff, and UW Associate Professor and Chair Brian McLaren. This collaboration between the University of Washington Architecture School and Olson Kundig will seek to unearth the inherent stories of place as a departure point for design.

Please click to view the 2018 Travel Scholarship for more information about Laura’s proposal.

NATIONAL & REGIONAL HONORS

Regional Firm Award

Mithun

Mithun is an integrated design firm with a shared mission to create positive change in people’s lives. As a national practice with offices in San Francisco and Seattle, the firm functions as one unified design studio with a humble and collaborative spirit founded on a process of inquiry and listening. Mithun’s team of architects, landscape architects, interior designers, urban designers and planners creates seamless experiences that are unique expressions of each client, community, and place. The work includes a wide range of typologies and scales, with a focus on urban environments, and the design of places where people live, work, and learn. The firm is an internationally recognized leader in sustainability, combining exemplary design with a focus on building and site performance, human health, and social equity.