AIA Names Winners of 2008 Honor Awards

	Photo © Timothy Hursley

26th Street Low-Income Housing, Santa Monica, California
Kanner Architects
This low-income family housing project is the product of an exhaustive community outreach mission. The design incorporates the region’s mild climate, historical precedents of Southern California Modernist architecture, and the human scale of residents and pedestrians.

Delta Shelter, Mazama, Washington
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects
This 1,000-square-foot weekend cabin is essentially a steel-clad box on stilts that can be completely shuttered when the owner is away. Raised above the ground to minimize potential flood damage and take in 360° views of the surrounding forest and mountains, the cabin was conceived as a low-tech, virtually indestructible weekend house.

Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles, California
Pfeiffer Partners Architects
This renovation took the famous telescope into new dimensions, restoring its mix of Beaux Arts, Neoclassical and Art Deco features while more than doubling its size with the addition of new exhibition spaces, a theater, and a café. Griffith Observatory, one of Los Angeles’ most visible and beloved landmarks, is an iconic presence in the Hollywood Hills.

Heifer International World Headquarters, Little Rock, Arkansas
Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects
The Heifer International Headquarters is designed as a series of ringed bands that radiate outward. Its narrow corridors ensure that all offices have access to natural sunlight, and a bevy of green features earned the design a spot on the AIA Committee on the Environment’s Top 10 Green list as well as LEED Platinum certification.

Loblolly House, Taylors Island, Maryland
KieranTimberlake Associates
The Loblolly House, by the 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award winner KieranTimberlake, draws inspiration and formal cues from the surrounding coastal flora and landscape: loblolly pines and saltmeadow cordgrass. The 1,800-square-foot house was modularly constructed with simple tools in only six weeks and is intended to sit lightly on the land.

Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington
Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism
This project is located on Seattle’s last undeveloped waterfront property, sliced by train tracks and an arterial road. The design connects three separate sites with an uninterrupted Z-shaped “green” platform, descending 40 feet from the city to the water, capitalizing on views of the skyline and Elliot Bay and rising over existing infrastructure to reconnect the urban core to the revitalized waterfront.

Residence Halls Units 1 & 2 Infill Student Housing, Berkeley, California
EHDD Architecture
The architects’ solution of infill student housing remedies the urban design challenges of an existing residential site, one block south of the University of California at Berkeley campus. The project increases the density of housing units, creates more usable open space for students, maintains a street wall with units oriented toward the public street, and helps to reduce the scale disparity between the existing housing and the more modest structures in the neighborhood.

Shaw Center for the Arts, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Schwartz/Silver Architects
The architects combined two primary public venues, the Museum of Art and the performing arts theaters, to form a single structure that cantilevers over the historic rebuilt Auto Hotel. Clad in channel glass and aluminum, the building is designed to withstand major hurricanes, as demonstrated by weathering hurricanes Katrina and Rita shortly after it opened.

The Liberty Memorial Restoration and Museum, Kansas City, Missouri
ASAI Architecture
Since structural and material decay shuttered it in 1994, the Liberty Memorial, with its iconic tower monument and public mall in Kansas City, Missouri, was the sleeping giant of early 20th century history. ASAI Architecture’s renovations restored the ailing facility and added 160,000 square feet of museum space, including an auditorium and education and research centers, that are all derived from the memorial’s original architectural vernacular.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Steven Holl Architects
The addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art places five translucent, rectangular boxes—called “lenses”—on the eastern edge of the museum’s campus. The new addition engages the existing sculpture garden, transforming the entire museum site into the precinct of the visitor’s experience. The expansion of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art fuses architecture with landscape to create an experiential architecture that unfolds for visitors as it is perceived through each individual’s movement through space and time.

Thomas L. Wells Public School, Ontario, Toronto
Baird Sampson Neuert Architects
The first of a new generation of high-performance “green” schools by the Toronto District School Board, Thomas L. Wells is intended to serve as a model demonstrating sustainable design principles and an enhanced learning environment. The building is conceived as a “system of systems,” integrating architectural design with environmental performance.

Trutec Building, Seoul, Korea
Barkow Leibinger Architects
This 11-story building situated over a five-level underground parking structure is clad in a mirrored fractal glass articulated into a series of crystalline-formed bays projecting 20 centimeters. This pattern refracts light and images, rendering the facade as a fragmented and abstract surface.

Unilever House (100 VE), London, England
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates
Following an extensive consultation process with Unilever, the City of London, and English Heritage, proposals were developed that achieved a balance between retaining the important parts of the historic fabric of the building and providing a transformed workplace and spatial experience for the many visitors to the building.

	Photo courtesy American Institute of Architects

Anthony Nak Flagship Store, Austin, Texas
M. J. Neal Architects
This elegant, subtle space shows exquisite designer jewelry. The plan is minimalist in the extreme, with white surfaces that vary subtly in texture and a single band of display cases running the circumference of the room.

Architects Office, Los Angeles, California
Lehrer Architects LA
Although the office would specifically house architects, the architects designed a multipurpose working space that simply and clearly honors the rudiments of work: vast work surfaces, a profusion of natural light, seamless connections to the landscape and fresh air, generous storage, and clearly individuated workstations that add up to a coherent, palpable group.

Center for Theatre and Dance, Williamstown, Massachusetts
William Rawn Associates Architects
Williams College’s Center for Theatre and Dance contains four distinct performance programs: a 550-seat main theater, renovated 210-seat theater, glass-walled dance studio, and a versatile 200-seat studio theater that can be arranged in end stage, arena, or thrust configurations. The center’s glass and wood lobby presents a narrow face to Main Street, maintaining a pattern of narrow facades established by other buildings on campus.

Central Park South Apartment, New York, New York
Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects
The owner of the Central Park South Apartment wanted a densely programmed dwelling where the architecture would act as a “coequal frame for the art, the furniture and the view.” Charles Gwathmey, FAIA, responded by using asymmetry and sculpted forms to create an enigmatic and unpredictable space that seamlessly incorporates the seemingly arbitrary layout of columns and plumbing lines.

Hotel Boutique La Purificadora, Puebla, Mexico
Legorreta + Legorreta
This renovation project, once a water purification factory from the 19th century, now houses the 32,290-square-foot Hotel Boutique. The original building was included as part of the new design combining contemporary elements with the rest of the former water-bottling factory.

Illinois State Capitol Chamber Restoration, Springfield, Illinois
Vinci | Hamp Architects
The Illinois State Capitol building, designed by French émigré architect Alfred Piquenard, was constructed between 1868 and 1888. The restoration scope included the re-establishment of significant architectural features from Piquenard’s era whenever possible while creating a functional setting for modern-day legislative activities.

Laboratory, Omaha, Nebraska
Randy Brown Architects
The design explores ways to intertwine what is man-made with what is natural. The intention is to create a house that is so interconnected with the land that it is simultaneously natural and man-made, much like abandoned tractors and farm machinery rusting away in the rural landscape.

Novelty Hill Januik Winery, Woodinville, Washington
Mithun
The new 31,000-square-foot winery in suburban Seattle represents a time-honored tradition, but with a fresh interpretation that respects the client’s love of modern architecture, advanced technology, and winemaking. This is a functional, efficient production facility and a welcoming gathering place that clearly establishes an identity distinct from other wineries in the area.

Private Residence, Northfield, Illinois
Roszak/ADC
Thomas Roszak, AIA, designed his own house to be an exploration of how to foster interaction among family members even while each person is engaged in different tasks in different rooms. To this end, the 8,200-square-foot house eliminates the redundancy of the typical suburban family room/living room combination, places the kitchen next to the children’s playroom, leaves the entire first floor unenclosed, and uses glass-paneled walls to further its sense of unencumbered interaction.

Tehama Grasshopper, San Francisco, California
Fougeron Architecture
This project transforms a warehouse in San Francisco into an office and residence with a rooftop penthouse. Glass panels separate the rooms, deconstructing traditional notions of public and private space, while an industrial palette of materials keeps the design consistent with the surrounding neighborhood. A surprising integration of old and new elements as well as competing urban forces brings the remodeled warehouse alive.

	Images courtesy University of Arkansas Community Design Center

Campus Hydroscapes, Fayetteville, Arkansas
University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Urban growth from the surrounding campus is disrupting a stream’s ecosystem and causing erosion, flooding, groundwater pollution and the loss of aquatic life. Ranging from small arrays of “hydrology pixilation” of streams and wetlands, to a large “total marsh,” each “hydroscape” proposal uses the purifying processes of natural streams and wetlands to rehabilitate the site.

Habitat Trails: A Low Impact Development, Rogers, Arkansas
University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Habitat Trails is a residential low-impact development (LID) consisting of 17 dwelling units for a nonprofit affordable housing provider committed to detached housing. The five-acre development incorporates LID technologies and a range of conservation planning strategies supportive of unit clustering that preserves one-third of the site as commonly held open space.

Los Angeles River Rehabilitation Master Plan, Los Angeles, California
CIVITAS
The 32-mile long concrete channel of the Los Angeles River cuts through the city with restrictive abandon. A team of engineers, urban designers, and landscape architects led the urban design and river planning efforts to create a master plan that will rehabilitate the river into a green amenity and an economic engine.

Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies
University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Northwest Arkansas is the nation’s sixth fastest growing region and is expected to double in population within the next 15 years. In the absence of strong local planning traditions, Visioning Rail Transit in northwest Arkansas is the first step in helping area residents envision smart growth development opportunities through context-responsive transportation planning at the regional scale.

Zuccotti Park, New York, New York
Cooper Robertson & Partners
The project, a densely urban open space, sits across from the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The original park was severely damaged during events on September 11, 2001, and later used as a staging area for the clean-up. Afterward, the owner retained the architect to develop designs for a new park in place of the old.