by: AIA New York Chapter
Every year since the program’s inception, the AIANY Design Awards have celebrated outstanding architectural design by AIANY members and New York-based architects, as well as recognizing local work by architects from around the world. Awards are given in four categories—Architecture, Interiors, Projects, and Urban Design—as reviewed by the seven-person jury who establish criteria, evaluate excellence, and determine the awards given for Honor and Merit designations. This year, Oculus guest editor Alan Brake will serve as moderator when the jury convenes in the coming weeks.
Honor and Merit winners will be revealed at the Design Awards Jury Symposium on March 6, 2017, and further celebrated at the Honors and Awards Luncheon on April 21, 2017. Keep reading to learn more about each 2017 AIANY Design Awards juror:
Hagy Belzberg FAIA, OAA, Founding Principal, Belzberg Architects
Hagy Belzberg received his Masters of Architecture with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has been awarded the American Institute of Architects California Council Emerging Talent Award, and was named an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York in 2008. In 2010, Belzberg was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. In 2014, he was invited to exhibit his work in the exhibition A New Sculpturalism, Contemporary Architecture from Southern California” at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Los Angeles.
Belzberg’s firm, Belzberg Architects, has earned over 70 international, national, and local design awards, including over 20 from AIA. His work has been featured in over 200 publications throughout more than 25 countries and has been honored with the AIA Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Committee Design Honor Award and the Green Building Award from the Mayor of Los Angeles. The Urban Land Institute recognized his design work and contribution to excellence in urban planning. In 2007, the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture, Canada featured his work at their Expanding Bodies Conference, which focused on “digital sensing and interactive and responsive systems.”
Belzberg’s approach to design is driven by investigation, particularly of non-traditional construction methods, and often through the use of digital fabrication. His projects continually question material conventions while applying innovative solutions to each design challenge. Since 1994, Belzberg has held graduate and undergraduate level instructorship and lecture positions at UCLA, USC, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
Barbara Bestor, FAIA, Founding Principal, Bestor Architecture
Barbara Bestor is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture by rigorously engaging the city through design, art and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies LA’s lessons to national undertakings. Bestor explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies.
Bestor’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies that balance a strong, instinctual modernism with popular culture and media. The Beats By Dre headquarters, an AIA National 2015 Honor Awards: Interior Architecture recipient, synthesizes the three founders’ hip-hop, rock and roll, and indie rock influences and deftly develops a variety of atmospheric and aesthetically functional environments within the larger workspace. The Silverlake Conservatory of Music, an internal urban village enclosed within a classic Hollywood warehouse, has created a vibrant musical haven for adults and children to interact with musicians.
Bestor has taught at Southern California’s leading design schools, including SCI-Arc and Woodbury University, where she is currently the executive director of Julius Shulman Institute. Along with her co-curators, Bestor conceived the first retrospective for the environmental designer Deborah Sussman. Currently, she is pursuing a collaborative exhibit on the work of architect Paul Williams, which will be on view in 2017. She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, has studied at the Architecture Association in London, and received her MArch at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.
Tatiana Bilbao, Principal, Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO
Through a multicultural and multidisciplinary office, the work of Tatiana Bilbao tries to understand the place that surrounds us in order to translate its rigid codes into architecture. It tries to regenerate spaces in order to humanize them as a reaction to global capitalism, opening up niches for cultural and economic development.
Bilbao’s work includes a botanical garden, a master plan, and open chapel for a Pilgrimage Route, a biotechnological center for a tech institution, a house that is built with $8,000, and a funeral home.
Bilbao was the recipient of the Kunstpries Berlin in 2012, and the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture Prize in 2014. In 2010, she named an Emerging Voice by the Architecture League of New York. Her work is part of the collection of the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, France and the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Bilbao has been a visiting professor at Yale School of Architecture, Rice School of Architecture, and the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Her work has been published in A+U, Domus, and The New York Times, among others.
Anne Fougeron, FAIA, Principal, Fougeron Architecture
Anne Fougeron is the principal of Fougeron Architecture in San Francisco, California. Born of French parents and raised in Paris and New York, she credits her bicultural upbringing as the source of her aesthetic values, which combine a respect for historic precedent with an interest in the intersection of old and new.
In 1986, she founded Fougeron Architecture and has gone on to design award-winning private and public sector projects in a decidedly modernist vocabulary. Known for her diverse portfolio featuring projects for institutional, commercial, healthcare, and residential clients, each project by Fougeron Architecture is subtly provocative. A primary concern is how the inhabitants of a building will interact with each other and with the building itself for years to come. The firm’s architecture enriches lives and communities, energizes cities, and advances social equality.
Fougeron has taught architectural design to undergraduate and graduate students at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Professional Practice in the Department of Architecture from 2003 to 2004. She continues to be involved in the design community as visiting critic for schools, lecturing on design topics, and serving on award juries.
Elizabeth Gray, FAIA, Principal and Partner, Gray Organschi Architecture
Elizabeth Gray is a principal and partner at Gray Organschi Architecture and a member of the fabrication construction firm JIG Design Build in New Haven, Connecticut.
Gray Organschi Architecture is recognized internationally for its innovative conception and careful crafting of architectural projects ranging from the adaptive re-use of damaged buildings and neighborhoods to the development and implementation of low-impact component assembly systems for ecologically delicate sites. In buildings for both private clients and community institutions, Gray Organschi Architecture has explored the intersection of environmental constraint, social need, and available resources to produce architecture that is environmentally sensitive as well as culturally and physically durable.
Gray Organschi’s current research project, the Timber City Initiative, explores the application of emerging structural wood technologies to the construction of global cities.
V. Mitch McEwen, Partner, A(n) Office, and Principal, McEwen Studio
As Partner at A(n) Office and Principal of McEwen Studio, V. Mitch McEwen works in architectural and urban design, focused particularly on the intersection of urban culture and global forces. A(n) Office was one of 12 US firms exhibited at the US Pavilion for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Before founding McEwen Studio, McEwen worked as an urban designer in the office of Bernard Tschumi Architects and at the NYC Department of City Planning. Her work has been exhibited at the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Since 2014, she has been Assistant Professor of Architecture at Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, after teaching as Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. McEwen holds a Masters of Architecture from Columbia GSAPP and a BA from Harvard Univeristy.
Peter Waldman, William R. Kenan Professor of Architecture, University of Virginia
Peter Waldman is an architect and educator. He believes architecture frames the flows of this changing world. Waldman studied architecture from 1961 to 69, first at Princeton University, and later as a Peace Corps volunteer architect in Arequipa, Peru. He served his apprenticeship in the studio of Richard Meier briefly and more substantially with Michael Graves. Since the 1970s, he has been an architect and educator, teaching first at Princeton, briefly at the University of Cincinnati, then at Rice University, and currently at the University of Virginia. The climatic condition has been the subject of his built projects, including the Parasol and Hurricane Houses in Houston; an Oasis for the Stegosaurus and the Trojan Horse in Galveston; and Parcel X, a satyric campsite in North Garden, Virginia.
Published internationally in Global Architecture, Area, Architecture, and, recently, Yale School of Architecture’s Perspecta, Waldman was recognized by the Architectural League of New York as an Emerging Voice in 1983 and as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 2000. His teaching has always benchmarked the beginning and the end and views architecture as a covenant with the world, collaged in his forthcoming seminal folio, The Word Made Flesh.