SEIDEL/HOLMAN - Architecture Magazine - May 1995

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AIA HONOR AWARDS

This year's AlA Honor Awards reflect the modest budgets, social agendas, and discriminating clients of the mid-1990s. The architecture, urban design, and interiors featured on the following pages present localized solutions to the challenges of designing infrastructure, cultural institutions, offices for new companies, affordable housing, and waterfronts. Recounts Frances Halsband, principal of Kliment and Halsband and chair of the architecture jury: "We read the values of clients in the forms, and gave prizes to architects whose work showed a seamless relationship to those values."

For instance, to develop The Farm, a mixed-income residential development near Santa Cruz, California, the Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition selected the tenants as carefully as it chose architect Seidel/Holzman, indicating a "consistent pattern" of community-mindedness. The owners of the Center for the Arts Theater, designed by Polshek and Partners for the Yerba Buena Gardens district of downtown San Francisco, demonstrate a similar investment in community. "They are running the facility in a way that encourages the local arts," Halsband observes. "We saw an incredible sense of social purpose." The architecture jury also favored vernacular forms and the seemingly "invisible hand" of the architect, as evidenced in Hawaii's Plantation Village by Spencer Mason Architects, a house at Teviot Springs Vineyard by William Turnbull and Cibolo Creek Ranch by Ford, Powell & Carson.

The urban design awards jury, chaired by Alexander Cooper, principal of Cooper Robertson Partners, rewarded schemes that preserve the existing character of cities, especially their natural features, and suggest ways to enhance them. Ehrenkrantz and Eckstut's proposal for new waterfront development in Baltimore, for example, extends the grain of adjacent neighborhoods with appropriately scaled blocks and streets. William Warner Architects reinstates Providence's public realm by relocating portions of three rivers in the downtown without moving a single building. And Solomon Architecture fashions a new neighborhood in San Jose that defers to the hilly topography. These award winners respect the public realm as much as the private.

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