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Award Winners

NMAAHC Wins 2018 Contract Magazine Interiors Award

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by Deane

The filigreed screen of the NMAAHC’s exterior reappears in the museum’s Oprah Winfrey Theater.

Contract Magazine announced the winners of its Interiors Awards for 2018 at a breakfast held in New York on January 26. The winners are featured online in the February print issue of Contract.

Among the winners is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), by the design team of Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroupJJR, which won recognition in the Civic/Public category. An excerpt from Contract of text I wrote about the NMAAHC is below:

Since opening more than a year ago, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has cemented its position as a cultural landmark in Washington, D.C. Located steps away from the White House and the Washington Monument on the edge of the National Mall, the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, connects to its greater context as it focuses on themes of resilience, movement, and memory.

The design team of Freelon Adjaye Bond / SmithGroupJJR conceived the multilevel museum in a restrained, monochromatic palette of metals, woods, and monolithic elements. The ground-floor Heritage Hall—surrounded by 15-foot-tall floor-toceiling windows on each side—serves as both a physical and emotional transition between the lower-level history galleries and the upper-level culture and community exhibitions. At the top of a grand stair, visitors can take in an uninterrupted view of the interior’s 160-foot height. “You want to welcome people in. It needs to be open and light, in terms of perceived weight and with regard to natural light coming in,” explains Phil Freelon, who was the lead architect. Perkins+Will has since acquired Freelon’s practice, and he is now design director for the firm’s North Carolina office.

Read the full story at Contract Magazine. 

Interview with AIA Gold Medal Winner James Polshek

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by Deane

James Polshek, winner of the 2018 AIA Gold Medal, served as design director for The Newseum in Washington, D.C.

“I thought it was a robocall,” James Polshek says about answering the phone to news that he’d won the 2018 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal. “It was a chilly day, and I was walking up 6th Avenue after leaving a chronologically required hearing test, when the phone rang.” Polshek is 87, but could hear the news just fine: “At that point, I kind of lost my breath,” he says. “I was laughing and sobbing simultaneously, with enjoyment, pleasure, and some disbelief.”

A 1955 M.Arch. graduate of Yale University, Polshek founded his eponymous firm in 1963, which evolved through the years to become Ennead Architects in 2010, five years after his retirement. He spoke with RECORD by phone after learning about the AIA award.

Architectural Record: Which projects are you proudest of, and why?

James Polshek: You know the saying, “If you have many children . . .” The most obvious one is perhaps the most nationally prestigious: the Clinton Library. But my two favorites came in succession in 1969 and 1972 and gave me the confidence to pursue the way I wanted to practice. The first was the New York State Bar Association in Albany, which won the 1972 AIA Honor Award for merging a historic building in a historic district with a modernist interpretation. The second is called the Five County Consulting Center in Columbus, Indiana, which solved environmental and ecological problems, as the building is a bridge over a creek that flooded severely. We used some of the foundation budget to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from simply widening the creek. Those two together—and the various themes that connect to later projects—were seminal.

For more about Polshek’s advice for young architects, his firm’s evolution, and ethical codes embedded in his work, read the full story at Architectural Record. 

Winter Winners: A Pair of Washington Museums in ArchitectureDC

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by Deane

The Winter 2017 issue of ArchitectureDC Magazine

The Winter 2017 issue of ArchitectureDC–the quarterly publication of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA|DC)–features winners of its 2017 Design Awards. It was my honor to write about two projects that earned Awards of Excellence from AIA|DC: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Smithsonian National Gallery East Building Renovation and Expansion. Both are projects that have been enormously influential in challenging the status of architecture in Washington.

The Winter 2017 issue of ArchitectureDC Magazine

Excerpts on each winning project are below, but be sure to pick up a copy of the ArchitectureDC Winter Issue at the District Architecture Center, which will host its 2017 Awards Show from Dec. 11-Jan. 26.

National Gallery of Art East Building Renovation and Expansion:

Restoring internationally acclaimed architecture–and expanding it from within–is no easy task, but that’s exactly the assignment Hartman-Cox Architects received from the National Gallery of Art for its 1978 East Building. Read the full story at ArchitectureDC. 

NMAAHC:

Occupying what may be the last buildable site on Washington’s Mall, the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) mediates the ground between museums and memorials by itself serving both purposes through a program that celebrates culture while recalling the painful history of slavery. Read the full story at ArchitectureDC.

 

Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winners embrace the creative spirit

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by Deane

Winners of the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards discuss the impact of design. L-R: Susan Chin, Mary Ping, Susan Szenasy, and Caroline Baumann.

Members of the design community welcomed three of the winners of the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, for a panel discussion on the importance and impact of design.

The awards program, now in its 18th year, honored 11 winners, including panelists Susan S. Szenasy, editor-in-chief of Metropolis Magazine, who won the Director’s Award; Mary Ping, founder of New York-based label Slow and Steady Wins the Race, for fashion design; and the Design Trust for Public Space, for corporate and institutional achievement, represented by executive director Susan Chin, FAIA.

The National Design Awards underscore the significance of design in an era where arts funding is increasingly at risk. According to Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton, the awards program is “a chance for solutions or optimism at a time when optimism toward seemingly intractable problems seems elusive.”

Elaborating upon that sentiment, Szenasy spoke of design and architecture as acts of hope: “Whatever you put out there is about future use of something,” she said. “The creative spirit in human beings is the most important spirit alive.”

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Simplify Your Office Renovation by Embracing the Past

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by Deane

American Republic Insurance Building. Image by Boscophotos, via Wikimedia Commons

 

If your office building is in need of a redesign, it’s important to consult with an architect to see if renovations make more sense than restarting from the ground up. Often times, you’ll find it’s cheaper and wiser to build upon what already works.

Such was the case for the American Enterprise Group’s headquarters building in Des Moines, Iowa, which was designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Gordon Bunshaft, FAIA, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Completed in 1965, the eight-story, 153,000-square-foot office building won an AIA Honor Award for Architecture in 1967; nearly five decades later, its sensitive renovation by BNIM has garnered a second AIA award for effectively updating systems while preserving the character of Bunshaft’s work.

Not every building, of course, has been designed by an architect of Bunshaft’s stature. In addition to the AEG headquarters, he was also responsible for some of the most iconic midcentury office buildings, from New York’s Lever House (with design coordinator Natalie de Blois) and Manufacturers Trust Company Building to the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Bunshaft’s contributions to the realm of cultural institutions include Washington, DC’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, as well as the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

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