Awards: The Latest Architecture and News

Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa have been recognized for their “leadership in sustainable and socially progressive design” by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Los Angeles-based architects will receive one of 10 National Design Awards given by the Museum in honor of “lasting achievement in American Design.”

Witold Rybczynski, writer and professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, will also receive a National Design Award for his many written contributions to architecture, urbanism and design. 

A complete list of the 2014 National Design Award winners, after the break...

Four projects have been shortlisted for the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) for Emerging Architecture. Announced by the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and its Dean Wiel Arets, the prestigious prize aims to recognize an emerging practice with the most outstanding built work in the Americas. The winner, which will be announced in May, will be awarded a $25,000 prize and an IIT research professorship that will focus on rethinking the metropolis.

Spanning the Americas from Chile to Canada, the shortlisted projects are... 

The Robert A.M. Stern Architects has awarded McGill University Masters candidate Anna Antropva with the 2014 RAMSA Travel Fellowship, a $10,000 award presented annually to "promote investigations of the perpetuation of tradition through invention" - key to the firm's own work. With the award, Antropva will travel to Japan to further her research into ancient wood joinery techniques and their potential to be transformed and manipulated into modern day construction. “This elegant and efficient mode of construction could meaningfully inform our western building industry," she stated during her presentation to a jury that included Melissa DelVecchio, Dan Lobitz, and Grant F. Marani.

The Noguchi Museum will be honoring architect Norman Foster and contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto as the first recipients of the Isamu Noguchi Award on Tuesday, May 13. The award acknowledges individuals whose work relates to landscape architect and artist Isamu Noguchi, who promoted a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach to the arts and was committed to innovation, global consciousness, and Japanese/American exchange. For more information on the benefit, see here.

The Architectural League Prize, one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects and designers, has been awarded to six emerging practitioners. Each recipient, whose work was deemed to be “exemplary and provocative” by the jury, presented their portfolios under the theme of “Overlay,” as the term “directs - rather than merely reconstructs - process.” This theme will now set the stage for a public forum in which each winner will use to exchange ideas.

The 2014 Architectural League Prize winners are:

Richard Serra has been announced as the first artist to win the Architectural League of New York President’s Medal. Serra, an American sculptor known for his large-scale sheet metal installations, was honored for “contributions his work makes to the way we think about space, viewer and object, site, and materiality, concerns relevant to both architects and the artist.”

In honor of Earth Day, we have complied a preview of the top ten most sustainable exemplars of U.S. architecture selected by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE). Each project featured will be honored with a COTE Top Ten Award for “sustainable design excellence” at the 2014 National Convention in Chicago. View them all, after the break...

Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Center is among seven shortlisted designs being considered for this year’s Design of the Year award. As announced by London’s Design Museum, the undulating cultural center was pulled from 76 innovative nominations and placed first in the architecture category. The shortlisted proposals, ranging from a portable eye examination kit to Volkswagen’s XL1 CAR, will remain on view at the museum through August 25. A winner is expected to be announced June 30.

The winners of the 2014 Canadian Urban Design Awards, a biennial competition recognizing projects that contribute to the vitality and sustainability of Canadian cities, were recently announced by the Royal Institute of Canada (RAIC), Canadian Institute of Planners, and Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. Eight individuals, organizations, and firms - including Perkins + Will for a masterplan in Edmonton - were recognized for their urban design efforts in categories such as Community Initiatives and Civic Design. For information and images on the winning entries, read on after the break.

Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray’s Unfinished Spaces has been awarded the 2014 Society of Architectural Historian’s (SAH) Award for Film and Video, an award presented annually to the “most distinguished work of film on the history of the built environment.” Initially released in 2011, the critically acclaimed documentary reveals the turbulent past of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and tells the story of his utopian dream to construct the Cuban National Arts Schools. You can learn more about the film here, and the school’s history, here.

RIBA has announced the first round of RIBA Regional Award winners, all of which will be considered for the RIBA national awards. From the list, Mecanoo's Library of Birmingham takes center stage, as the artisan-inspired structure received a number of awards, including the West Midlands Building of the Year and Emerging Architect. Check out the complete list, after the break...

Dear readers, as the phenomenal architects we are confident you are, it is time to enter the search for the 2014 World Architecture Festival (WAF) awards. Annually recognizing the globe’s most impressive works, WAF is the largest architecture festival (and live awards) on the planet.

If shortlisted, you will be invited to defend your project this October at the Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore in front of a “super jury,” chaired by Richard Rogers, that includes architects Rocco Yim, Julie Eizenberg, Enric Ruiz Geli, Peter Rich and more. 

AS.Architecture-Studio has announced the 2014 Young Architects in Africa. The award aims to highlight creative African projects and help a rising generation of young architects achieve worldwide recognition. Selected from nearly 200 projects, these three practices have been named as finalists: Architects of Justice (South Africa), Urko SANCHEZ (Kenya), and Andre CHRISTENSEN & Mieke DROOMER (South Africa).

First an Emerging Voices recipient, now a laureate of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s (RAIC) Emerging Architectural Practice Award; Toronto’s Williamson Chong Architects has proved themselves to be one of Northern America’s most promising firms. Founded just three short years ago, the seven-person practice has been chosen to be the RAIC’s second Emerging Practice Award recipient for “consistently producing innovating projects that contain quality detailing and craftsmanship.”

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected ten recipients for their 14th annual Housing Awards. Considered to be the year's most impressive works, the awards are designed to "recognize the best in U.S. housing design" and "promote the importance of good housing as a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit and a valuable national resource." The winners, after the break...

Architect Raymond Moriyama, founder of Toronto-based Moriyama and Teshima Architects, has collaborated with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) to launch an international CAD $100,000 prize open to architects with “outstanding” work or non-architects who have had an “exceptional contribution to architecture.”

With an aim to raise the stature of the RAIC and “inspire all Canadians and Canadian architects to aspire higher,” as Moriyama stated, the biennial Moriyama RAIC International Prize has the potential to rival the Pritzker as one of the world’s largest, and expectantly most “prestigious” cash prizes in architecture.

However, based on the ideals of “Moriyama’s passion for humanistic architecture that transforms society through an emphasis on values such as social justice, equality and inclusivity,” the Prize is expected to set itself apart from Pritzker's focus on lifetime achievement.

The Washington Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA|DC) has announced the 2014 Unbuilt Award competition winners. The annual award, now in its sixth edition, was created as a response to the global economic crisis that brought many architectural projects to a halt. Thus the awards are designed to recognize both delayed and theoretical projects that are deemed imaginative and thought-provoking.

The 2014 winners are...

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the recipients of its 2014 architecture awards. Recognized as an architect who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art, Massimo Scolari was awarded the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture - a $20,000 award whose laureates include Peter Zumthor and this year’s Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban.

See who else was awarded one of the Academy’s prestigious architecture awards, after the break...