by: AIA New York
Dear AIANY members and friends,
AIA New York (AIANY) holds itself as an organization, as well as our members, to the highest standard of integrity, ethics and decency, and we view any breach of that standard as completely unacceptable. Therefore, given allegations of inappropriate and unacceptable behavior by two AIANY 2018 Design Award Recipients—Richard Meier and Peter Marino—the AIANY Board of Directors has made the decision to rescind the honors that were announced in January 2018 and were to be celebrated at the Honors and Awards Luncheon next month.
Our decision does not speak to the design quality of the projects or the contributions from the respective firms’ design teams. Rather we cannot in good conscience confer these awards under these circumstances.
As the leading professional organization for architects, we encourage members to speak freely about concerns and issues, and therefore are providing our members with additional resources and support to address any and all alleged harassment within our community. We will be offering workshops on creating harassment free workplaces in the coming weeks. We will be lobbying for updates to official AIA policies and procedures to make it explicit that harassment is unacceptable. Finally, we encourage our members to useLegalLine, a service that provides access and advice for legal issues.
For questions and more information about these efforts email membervoices@aiany.org.
Benjamin Prosky, Assoc. AIA
Executive Director, AIA New York