AIA Seattle Announces 2020 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 2020 Honorees! This year, amidst our many local and global crises, we are committed to celebrating the best of our profession. Our virtual awards program will take place on Friday, October 2, and we look forward to honoring this year’s awardees in-person at the earliest opportunity to do so safely. Click below for details on the program.

Click here to view the recorded awards ceremony and acceptance speeches.

2020 HONOREES

Gold Medal

Walter Schacht FAIA

Walter Schacht, FAIA has practiced architecture for over thirty years with a central focus on the public realm. He thinks strategically about the relationships between people, place and process. His clearly planned, carefully detailed civic buildings reflect a search for meaning inspired by their community, context and culture. Walter’s partnership with architect Cima Malek-Aslani is the foundation of his practice.

Walter works with his colleagues and clients to promote public policies that advance the profession and the community. He served as AIA Seattle President, on AIA Seattle’s Public Policy Board, AIA Washington Council and chaired Washington State’s Capital Projects Advisory Board. In 2013, Walter was inducted into the AIA College of Fellows for his distinguished body of work and activism. In 2015, he received AIA Seattle’s Community Service Award and AIA Washington Council’s Jennie Sue Brown Award for service to the profession.

Young Architect Award

Sarah Haase AIA

Sarah is an architect interested in designing and advocating for a socially and culturally conscious built environment. A generalist and a strategist, Sarah believes the best designs come from deeply engaging with the users and context of the projects’ communities and environment. Her current work with Schemata Workshop falls under the umbrella of community-based design, with clients such as non-profit affordable housing developers, social service providers, and public transit agencies.

Originally from Germany, she moved to Seattle after graduating with her B. Arch and Minor in Leadership and Social Change from Virginia Tech. Sarah has been advocating for a broader understanding and application of the positive impact of design through organizing the annual Seattle Design Festival, serving on the board of Design in Public, speaking on panels about equitable housing, assisting with Youth Workshops with the Seattle Architecture Foundation, and participating in the Housing Development Consortium’s Affordable Housing Leadership Cohort.

Garrett Reynolds AIA

Garrett Reynolds, AIA LEED AP BD+C is an architect at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. His work strives for elegant, clear design solutions that thoughtfully respond to the unique circumstances of place. He takes pride in being a generalist architect with strong interests in building tectonics, conceptual design, and research – all with a focus on craft and detail. His interest in housing of all scales and types has resulted in a highly varied portfolio of work at BCJ and Mithun including a large mixed-use project in Portland’s Pearl District, a significant private residence in Big Sur, and a family retreat in Iowa.

Garrett is highly involved in the Seattle design community. He co-chaired the 2016 Urban Housing Forum and chaired the 2020 Virtual Housing Design Week. He continually strives to incite conversation around Seattle’s livability and positive urban growth strategies. He led BCJ’s submission to the City of Seattle’s DADU Competition and has written numerous articles on the topics of housing, transportation, and urban livability that have been published in ARCADE, Seattle Magazine, and the Daily Journal of Commerce. Garrett received the AIA Seattle Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship in 2015 and the Donald and Joanna Sunshine Architecture Fellow Alumni Award in 2020.

Honorary AIA Seattle Membership

Casey Schuchart

Casey is a fifth-generation construction professional whose career has been honed through time spent working in the field, estimating, project engineering, project management, and division management roles. He was instrumental in the delivery of the Bullitt Center; a six-story office building deemed the ‘greenest’ commercial building in the world. As the President of Schuchart, Casey leads the team through the execution of business initiatives and strategies. Casey earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of San Diego and an MBA from Seattle University. Casey currently serves as the immediate Past President for the Seattle Architecture Foundation, while also serving as a board member for the Seattle Aquarium and the Lakeside Alumni Board.

Ellen Sollod

Ellen Sollod is a civic artist and activist who has worked to integrate art into the public realm for over four decades–as an artist, policy maker, art planner and administrator.

Her public art can be found throughout the Pacific Northwest in light rail stations, streetscapes, bridges, parks, plazas, educational facilities and even a waste water treatment plant. Her permanent works are deeply rooted in the site, often referencing its hidden history.

As an art planner, Ellen has laid the groundwork for many other artists to bring their artistic vision to life.

As a policy maker, she served on the Seattle Design Commission, Seattle Public Art Advisory Committee and as the Executive Director of the Seattle Arts Commission.

Ellen was a NAIUSI fellow and has received awards from Allied Arts and 4 Culture.

She has maintained throughout her practice a deep and abiding commitment to the public realm and to collaboration with design teams and the community.

Marshall Foster

Marshall Foster is the Director of Seattle’s Office of the Waterfront and Civic Projects (OWCP). OWCP leads the “Waterfront Seattle” program, which is creating 20 acres of new parks and public spaces on Seattle’s Central Waterfront, and is supporting the Pike Place Market and Seattle Aquarium in completing major expansions. The Office is also leading efforts around the redevelopment of Key Arena and Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center.

Prior to that Marshall served as the Seattle’s Planning Director from 2009 through 2014, where he oversaw plans for South Lake Union’s expansion, along with community plans for the Rainier Valley, Capitol Hill, the University District and Northgate. He holds a Master’s Degree in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives with his wife and two children in West Seattle.

Greg Briggs

Greg Briggs grew up the son of a civil engineer and was exposed to engineering as an early teen working at his dad’s firm. Fascinated with the design of buildings led him to get his master’s degree in Structures from North Carolina State after receiving his BSCE from Oklahoma State. As a structural engineering consultant for over 30 years primarily in Seattle, he has had the opportunity to work on many significant projects and with several great architects in Seattle and across the globe. His project types have varied from museums, performing arts, institutional and historic renovations as well as many others. He recently served as the principal engineer-of-record on the landmark Climate Pledge Arena renovation project.

The Islandwood project on Bainbridge Island was pivotal early in his career in understanding sustainable design and the role of the structural engineer. This inspired him to become a founding member of the Structural Engineering Institute’s Sustainability Committee and authoring articles and co-authoring a book, as well as lecturing on the topic.

Community Service Award

Richard Browning AIA

Rick Browning is a fourth generation Floridian who ran far away from home and then spent his career as an architect and activist trying to protect the Pacific NW from the environmental degradation he had witnessed in the Sunshine State.

With his own Portland based firm he worked on projects such as the retrofit of all seven non-freeway Willamette River bridges for better bike, pedestrian and disabled user access. He chaired the committee which oversaw Portland’s first Bicycle Masterplan and served on myriad other committees and task forces.

In Seattle, Rick chaired the Chapter’s Urban Design Forum and more recently the Chapter’s Transportation Task Force. He also served on both the Chapter’s governing Board and Public Policy Board. Pro bono work has included spearheading a task force to create an Urban Design Element for the City’s Comp Plan and many individual battles to equitably repurpose public right-of-way.

Allied Organization Award

Housing Development Consortium

Founded in 1988 by 10 Seattle-area nonprofit housing providers, HDC’s membership has grown over the last 32 years to encompass all the major affordable housing developers, financial institutions, architects, general contractors, attorneys, accountants, service providers, public housing authorities, and government agencies, working in the affordable housing space in King County, Washington. United around our shared vision – “That all people live with dignity in safe, healthy, and affordable homes within communities of opportunity” – our membership-based network collaborates effectively to provide a wide range of stable and affordable housing opportunities for our region’s low income and most vulnerable residents. Each night, more than 125,000 individuals go home to more than 45,000 affordable homes created or preserved by HDC members. By bringing together organizations, government agencies, and businesses around shared values, we are better positioned to support the sector’s ability to make a positive, community-wide impact. Guided by our members and volunteer Board of Directors, we weave a powerful network of strategic alliances across sectors and industries to respond to diverse community needs and provide capacity-building, networking, and advocacy opportunities all geared toward creating a sector that is more equitable, productive, efficient, and effective as good stewards of public resources.

Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship

Queena Yi Assoc. AIA

Queena Yi, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP BD+C, is an architectural designer with over six years of experience and is anticipating licensure this year. Her previous work experience at Katerra and Perkins + Will, where she managed senior housing projects and a WeWork | WeLive project, provided the foundation for this Travel Scholarship proposal. Previous to pursuing a career in architecture, Queena worked for over a decade at various startup tech companies in San Francisco and Seattle. She received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego and an M.Arch from the University of Washington. During her studies at the UW, Queena received a Scan Design Fellowship to study at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen for one year. Her time in Copenhagen provided the groundwork for her thesis project, Memento Mori | A Non-Sectarian Memorial Site in Seattle, which was later selected for the AIA 2015 Emerging Professionals Exhibit. Queena has been active in the design community by participating in the UW PAC, Design in Public, and Seattle Architecture Foundation at various capacities.

View the 2020 Travel Scholarship announcement for more information about Queena’s proposal.

REGIONAL & NATIONAL HONORS

2019 Regional Emerging Firm Award

Best Practice

Best Practice is a design-intensive firm located in Seattle, WA. Despite our size (we are 8) and relatively young age as an office (founded in 2011), we relish tackling a diverse range of work, from small boutiques or residences to large scale offices & cultural projects. We believe that meaningful design is a balance between inspiration and the real-life needs of each project. From there, intuitive and experiential design often emerges. Our strength lies in our ability to creatively collaborate – with each other, with our fabricators, with our clients, all to provide innovative solutions that explore the precarious balance between function, content and beauty.

We are very fortunate to have a close working relationship with many local designers, artists, scientists and engineers… seeking like-minded people to partner with on project components is one of the best parts of working in a city like Seattle. These talented individuals lend their craft and insight to our projects, helping us realize a vision that provides a measure of unique, locally crafted feeling in all of our works. While we like to dream big with our work, we are no strangers to the realities of budget & time, and affirm that organization, planning and proper procedures help produce successful projects.

2019 Regional Firm Awards

Weinstein A+U

Weinstein A+U is a 25-person generalist architectural firm located in Seattle Washington. Founded by Ed Weinstein in 1977, the firm provides comprehensive design services on a broad array of building types including education, social service, institutional, public sector, public safety, commercial, mixed-use, multi-family residential, single family residential, adaptive re-use, and urban design. By integrating an urban design perspective, the firm is especially effective in the design of complex urban projects.

Our work is rational, intelligible, and straightforward. We combine rigorous site and program analysis with a disciplined design process. We endeavor to design buildings that fit their circumstances, earn broad community support, are constructed efficiently and cost effectively, and serve as exemplars for design excellence.

We are especially proud that the recognition for design excellence that we have received for such diverse projects testifies to the significance of our fundamental mission: to design thoughtful buildings that reflect the values of the communities we serve.