We’re excited to share that two of our projects were Jury Award winners for the 2020 Architizer A+Awards, and one project won a Popular Choice award. The annual awards celebrate the best buildings and spaces, and are judged by more than 400 luminaries from fields as diverse as fashion, publishing, product design, real estate, and tech.
Learn more about the winning projects:
First Year Student Village, designed by our Miami studio
Unbuilt Institutional Category Jury Winner
Located in the City Beautiful of Coral Gables Florida, the campus has carried a tradition of an environment where buildings are nestled in gardens, allowing for unique opportunities to dialogue with nature and create indoor and outdoor spaces enriched by the local climate.
Imagine then, an active campus center where a garden provides connectivity from all corners of the campus with communities rising into the sky for commanding views. Two welcoming arms housing the vertical communities extend towards the lake, providing vistas to the campus and east towards the heart of the city that give the Institution its name.
The First Year Student Village represents a culture that celebrates diversity and dynamism. A resolute effort to be future-ready and a historical commitment to a healthy environment that fosters collaboration, engagement, knowledge, and creativity.
This design focuses on the belief that resiliency and restorative strategies are to be at the center of the next generation of buildings. We design and develop new building environments that are responsive and informed by their context. This is the imperative and at the core of this proposal.
Living design is the is the lens through which this building becomes an evolution of what it means to create a community, enhance learning and provide safety and shelter. Because individuality has a dominant role in student life and its ultimate success, each of the four houses are unique with a common bond to unite them. The houses are elevated to liberate the ground plane for pedestrian-scaled traffic between the lake and the canal. By elevating the houses, we encourage a student experience that benefits from changes in perspective from within and without.
Billerica Memorial High School, designed by our Boston studio
Architecture +Light Jury Winner
Throughout the school day, the cadence and rhythm of light energizes student life with measure and meaning to enrich expanding minds. Singular among design media, daylight has the unique power to establish this cadence and with it, the experience of education. The design of Billerica High School transcends basic academic illumination requirements with a solution premiating natural daylight over artificial light, to amplify the presence of nature and diversity of the student’s school experience.
The school is built around passive strategies for daylighting. Patrick Cunningham, the project’s lead designer has spent his career studying daylighting, and Billerica is a milestone design for him, incorporating extensive research on these strategies.
“A student’s day has a meaningful cadence,” says Cunningham. “Daylight, more than any other design medium has the power to sync with that rhythm and amplify it’s experience. With this design we sought to move beyond the functional necessities of lighting academic spaces and find an architecture where daylight is thought of as a fundamental material.”
The Exchange at 100 Federal Street, designed by our Boston studio
Best Coworking Space Popular Choice Winner
The glass structure of the Exchange is shaded by surrounding office towers for 75% of daytime hours in the summer, producing a bright, diffuse interior that invites passersby to step inside and take a call, meet with a colleague, or work alone on a laptop—without the harsh glare of direct sunlight.
