2022 ARCHITECTURAL EXCELLENCE DESIGN AWARDS
Each year, AIA Pennsylvania celebrates the great work that Pennsylvania’s architects are doing to affect positive social, environmental, and economic outcomes for their clients and communities. The AIA Pennsylvania Architectural Excellence Design Awards celebrate the exemplary design achievements of members and the impact of architecture regardless of budget, size, style, or type. The jury recognizes projects deemed worthy of recognition with the following levels of distinction.
- Silver Medal | A Silver Medal may be granted, at the jury’s discretion, to the project that distinguishes itself from the rest of the submissions representing the highest level of achievement.
- Honor Award | An Honor Award may be granted, at the jury’s discretion, to projects that exemplify distinguished achievement in any category.
- Merit Award | A Merit Award may be granted, at the jury’s discretion, to any project that either lies outside of the other categories or bears an exceptional aspect that the jury feels represents excellence that deserves recognition.
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Orange Crush
Award: Silver Medal
Architecture Firm: ISA
Architecture Firm Size: Midsize (10-49 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: Equinox Management and Construction
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 46,250 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $151/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Sam Oberter and Plural VR
Category: Architecture
The site plan for this 49-unit, 5-story mixed-use multifamily in Philadelphia was inspired by its odd geometry and adjacent edges. Sandwiched between a sunken railroad right-of-way, a historic brick industrial building, and a neighborhood school, the building’s context contributed to its character. Rather than situate the building’s lobby in a typical street-facing position, residents are invited down a narrow side alley, generating an entry experience deeply rooted in place.
Student Innovation Center
Award: Silver Medal
Architecture Firm: KieranTimberlake with Substance Architecture
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Ames, IA
Client: University of Iowa
Primary Use/Type: Education - College/University
Total Project Area: 242,218 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $243/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Peter Aaron/OTTO
Category: Architecture
Iowa State University’s Student Innovation Center supports the university’s reputation for innovation with a high-quality, centralized space for student work in all fields of study. Certified LEED Gold, the 144,000 square foot building hosts makerspaces, classrooms, coworking spaces, and design studios. Its pleated curtainwall distinguishes the building on campus while managing the effects of solar heat gain. This flexible, dynamic building encourages around-the-clock experimentation at ISU.
The Block
Award: Silver Medal
Architecture Firm: ISA
Architecture Firm Size: Midsize (10-49 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: Alliance HP Philadelphia
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 58,200 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $215/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Sam Oberter and Plural VR
Category: Architecture
Project Partner: The Block and ISA is supported by Alliance HP, owner, and developer of the project. Alliance HP is a vertically integrated commercial real estate investment firm that acquires, develops, repositions, leases, and manages a diverse range of assets, with a primary focus on industrial and office properties in the Greater Philadelphia and South Florida markets.
The Block bridges an existing gap between walkable urban fabric and suburban big-box surface parking with a novel mixed-use housing typology. An unusual approach to circulation takes cues from Philadelphia’s rowhouse fabric, minimizing interior corridors and instead relying on an elevated, landscaped deck as primary access for upper-level walk-ups. Featuring multiple apertures in plan and section, the building opens unexpected views and reconnects de-activated urban edges with fresh pedestrian experiences.
Barnegat House
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: DIGSAU
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Barnegat Light, NJ
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Single Family Detached
Total Project Area: 6,250 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $175/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Todd Mason, Halkin Mason Photography
Category: Single Family Residential
The owners’ design for a more humble surf shack is expressed through simplicity of form, active street presence, and focus on indoor-outdoor connections. This home stands in contrast to the highly articulated homes dominated by tuck under parking and storage which have replaced the modest, simple structures that historically gave beach towns a coherent architectural charm.
Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: Ballinger and Associate Architect, DBVW Architects
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Kingston, RI
Client: University of Rhode Island
Primary Use/Type: Education - College/University
Total Project Area: 190,000 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $628/sq. ft.
Photography credit: James Ewing and Albert Vecerka/Esto
Category: Architecture
Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering began as a master planning initiative to develop a cross-discipline teaching and research complex that would enable the University of Rhode Island College of Engineering to meet the ever-changing technology demands and global reach of engineering. In addition to creating a distinctive new campus identity and visibility for the College, it also creates a vibrant place of interaction and innovation for the entire URI community.
Flag Lot Five
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: KJO Architecture
Architecture Firm Size: Small (2-9 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Single Family Attached
Total Project Area: 15,239 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $90/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Sam Oberter Photography and KJO Architecture
Category: Small Project
The site for these tucked-away rowhomes is a flag lot in a dense residential neighborhood accessible via a secluded pedestrian path on one side and private alley on the other. These units are flipped front-to-back, with the entrances facing a private garden courtyard. The massing at the fronts varies and shifts, the stacked and recessed volumes evoking the organic pattern of small rear additions traditionally seen in Philadelphia’s rowhome neighborhoods.
Foreign Affairs Security Training Center
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: KieranTimberlake
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Blackstone, VA
Client: General Services Administration
Primary Use/Type: Other
Total Project Area: 612,645 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Photography credit: Tim Griffith
Category: Architecture
Located on a 1,350-acre site, the Foreign Affairs Security Training Center provides lifesaving security training to Department of State personnel. Training is provided in 19 distinct venues including firearms facilities, simulated tactical environments, two explosives pads, and 19 miles of specialized driving courses. Repeatable and economical construction systems establish an architectural language that is flexible enough for use on numerous dispersed buildings of varying use, scale, and context.
Riverside Row
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: Bright Common
Architecture Firm Size: Small (2-9 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Multi-Family, 5 or more units
Total Project Area: 20,000 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Photography credit: Sam Oberter
Category: Architecture
Riverside Row utilizes an adjacent stormwater management garden as a genesis for communal-focused urban design. It presents a dynamic response to an underutilized condition and provides residents with exterior spaces distinct amongst a city of stoops. The project favors density appropriately tuned to the surrounding urban fabric while thoughtfully considering the role of open space and setbacks in relieving congested streetscapes.
Sawyer Art Apartments
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: ISA
Architecture Firm Size: Midsize (10-49 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Detroit, MI
Client: URGE Development, N’Namdi Holdings, Hosey Development
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 37,700 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $220/sq. ft.
Rendering credit: -
Category: Un-Built
The Sawyer Art Apartments project encourages active street life and incremental, right-sized development, plugging into Detroit’s new biking and pedestrian streetscape improvements along West McNichols Road in the Live6 community. With a pitched roof relating to adjacent homes, the walk-up portion of the 38-unit building has active residential entries accessed through a public landscaped plaza and a common amenity deck framed by Detroit-based artist Tylonn J. Sawyer’s murals.
Siebel Center for Design
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and Associate/Local Architect, Ratio Architects
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Champaign, IL
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Education - College/University
Total Project Area: 60,000 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $607/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Jeffrey Totaro
Category: Architecture
The Siebel Center for Design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a hub for practicing, modeling, and teaching design thinking through experimentation, prototyping, and making. The 60,000 square-foot project provides light filled, technology-enabled, and easily reconfigurable spaces to help students find the ideal setting and tools to suit their creative needs. Strategies for well-being, resource efficiency, and equity were integral to the project’s LEED Gold design.
The Carriage House
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: OOMBRA Architects
Architecture Firm Size: Small (2-9 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Detroit, MI
Client: Brush Park Properties, LLC
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 89,100 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Rendering credit: K2 Visual
Category: Un-Built
The Carriage House engages in a dialogue - old and new, past and future, and emerges as a symbol for the adaptability of the city of Detroit. It will provide places to live, work, and play through both new construction and the adaptive reuse of the historic structure. Sensitive to the local context and history of Brush Park, this development continues the positive resurgence and revival in Detroit.
Urban Boat House
Award: Honor Award
Architecture Firm: OOMBRA Architects
Architecture Firm Size: Small (2-9 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Detroit, MI
Client: METHOD DEVELOPMENT
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 21,250 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Rendering credit: -
Category: Un-Built
The Urban Boat House strives to connect an urban canal to its surrounding neighborhood by providing public space and access to the waterfront. The redevelopment connects the street to the canal while repurposing the existing boat house into an outdoor dining experience. By providing public amenities on a privately developed site, the project is a destination for people to gather around shared interests, strengthening their sense of community.
Bulletin Building Renovation
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: KieranTimberlake
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: Brandywine Realty Trust
Primary Use/Type: Office - Large
Total Project Area: 265,219 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Photography credit: Halkin Mason Photography and Matt Krissel / KieranTimberlake
Category: Preservation Architecture
Adaptive reuse of the Bulletin Building transforms a 1955 structure into contemporary life science space as centerpiece of the emerging Schuylkill Yards innovation district. A new high-performance eastern façade is bold on the urban scale and sensitive to the original design intent, dramatically increasing light and view while reducing energy loads. The juxtaposition of new and old creates a conversation across time, establishing a paradigm for renovation of mid-century structures.
Digital Foundry at New Kensington
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: R3A Architecture
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: New Kensington, PA
Client: Economic Growth Connection of Westmoreland
Primary Use/Type: Mixed-Use
Total Project Area: 15,044 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $312.42/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Ed Rombout
Category: Impact Design
Responding to the need for economic revitalization and technical re-skilling, the Digital Foundry at New Kensington aims to refresh the rust belt community. The objective is to attract, retain and create businesses in New Kensington and offer employment to local residents. The project includes computer technology lab, a multipurpose workforce training center that can be subdivided into classrooms, collaboration areas, meeting rooms, office space, demonstration area and high bay garage.
Gettysburg Montessori Charter School
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: DIGSAU
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Gettysburg, PA
Client: Gettysburg Montessori Charter School
Primary Use/Type: Education - K12 School
Total Project Area: 15,200 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $296/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Todd Mason, Halkin Mason Photography
Category: Architecture
The joyful Gettysburg Montessori Charter School renovation and addition has been transformative in fostering interaction and community among this tight-knit K-6 public charter school. This project consolidates all school activities into one cohesive, community-oriented building with high-quality classroom space, gathering areas, library, art, music/ performance, and administrative offices. The two wings of classrooms are organized and color-coded by age range.
House B
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: KJO Architecture
Architecture Firm Size: Small (2-9 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Single Family Attached
Total Project Area: 3,450 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $120/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Sam Oberter Photography
Category: Small Project
HOUSE B reconfigures the classic 3-story Philadelphia rowhome. The traditional entry sequence is unexpectedly interrupted by inserting a split-level foyer accessed at sidewalk level, serving as a buffer from street noise while creating visual privacy for the elevated living spaces beyond. Circulation to the upper levels is organized around a 2-story light well serving as a focal point from the interior, and a dramatic transparent rear wall from the exterior.
House on 5th
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: BIONDO+Projects
Architecture Firm Size: Sole Practitioner (1 employee/total staff)
Project Location: Bethlehem, PA
Client: -
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Single Family Detached
Total Project Area: 1,350 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $170/sq. ft. Architect acted as CM, Laborer and performed some of work.
Photography credit: Matt Wargo, Photographer
Category: Single Family Residential
House on 5th is an entry-level dwelling - an architect's self-initiated exercise in challenging and developing a local architecture within a working class community. The highly efficient plan and unadorned "child-like" form is coupled with a curious deployment of ordinary materials. The result is a high quality, fiscally accessible house that will assume an important role as a contextually relevant backdrop within an everyday neighborhood.
Kinesiology Building
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: Ballinger and Associate Architect, TMP Architecture, Inc.
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Ann Arbor, MI
Client: University of Michigan
Primary Use/Type: Education - College/University
Total Project Area: 217,533 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): $392/sq. ft.
Photography credit: Feinknopf Photography
Category: Preservation Architecture
A century ago, when Albert Kahn designed the University of Michigan’s Kraus Building, Kahn met their laboratory needs by adopting the innovations of factory design, aimed at maximizing daylight, to an academic setting. The cutting edge of science has moved on, and today the university’s fourth largest school is kinesiology. The university needed to consolidate the school’s programs, scattered across multiple buildings, into a single home with room for expansion.
NC Five
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: WRT
Architecture Firm Size: Large (50+ employees/total staff)
Project Location: Philadelphia, PA
Client: Jonathan Rose Companies
Primary Use/Type: Residential - Mid-Rise/High-Rise
Total Project Area: 152,000 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Photography credit: JEFFREY TOTARO
Category: Architecture
NC Five is a resident-driven, sustainable, urban community demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between the built and natural environments activating a dynamic urban neighborhood. The program brings a comprehensive approach to revitalization -- linking new and rehabilitated housing with well-functioning services, schools, public assets, transportation, and access to jobs while the expansive outdoor spaces promotes physical and mental health, wellness, and healthy urban ecologies reducing the adverse environmental impacts of cities.
Waterside Park
Award: Merit Award
Architecture Firm: PORT
Architecture Firm Size: Midsize (10-49 employees/total staff)
Project Location: Washington, PA
Client: North Franklin Township
Primary Use/Type: Other
Total Project Area: 3,876,840 sq. ft.
Cost ($USD/sq ft): -
Rendering credit: PORT
Category: Regional and Urban Design
Waterside Park is a new 89-acre park in Washington County, PA. At the epicenter of Pennsylvania’s fracking industry, the project attempts to elevate the consideration of ecological assets and civic infrastructure in the public imagination of one of the most conservative counties in the state. The park will become a civic center for gathering and nature-based recreation for the North Franklin Township community.