Earlier this year, AIA Memphis presented its 2002 Design Awards to four deserving projects during the chapter’s annual Celebration of Architecture. The evening featured a talk by Michael Graves, FAIA, to more than 300 architects, interior designers, interns, students, and other architecture lovers—the chapter’s largest ever attendance. Firms throughout Memphis submitted projects in the four categories: new construction; renovation, restoration, or rehabilitation; interiors; and residential. A jury of award-winning architects from Louisiana and Washington, D.C., selected this year’s honorees.

Award of Excellence
Two Memphis firms, Looney Ricks Kiss Architects Inc., and Self Tucker Architects Inc., received the Award of Excellence, AIA Memphis’ highest design honor, for their collaboration on the National Civil Rights Museum expansion. The project entailed restoring two historic buildings adjacent to the 1991 museum to house artifacts chronicling the time around the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The newest part of the exhibit space, “The Legacy,” will undergo continual change to show the evolution of the civil rights movement since King’s death. The project raised visibility of the museum, providing a new entrance and 12,500 square feet of new exhibit space in a former boarding house on Memphis’s Main Street. It also houses an outdoor promenade, a refurbished gift shop, and an underground corridor linking the boarding house to the main museum space built adjacent to the Lorraine Motel, the site where King was shot. (Photo 2002©Esto Photographics/Albert Vecerka)

Hat trick for Archimania
Archimania, a small Memphis firm, received all three Awards of Merit given this year. Their honored projects are:

Backstop Baseball Emporium occupies the ground floor of an eight-story commercial building adjacent to a new AAA baseball stadium. It offers retail space in which Memphis Redbird shirts, caps, and other baseball souvenirs are displayed and sold. The architects’ goal was to design space to play off the existing, oversized 36-inch-diameter columns to “reinforce the heroic nature of baseball.” Jury members called it “a powerful space,” and presented the architects with a Merit Award for Interiors. (Photo © Jeffery Jacobs, Architectural Photography Inc.)

Joyce Signs Inc. project, which captured a Merit Award for Interiors, includes a conference room, workstations for designers, sales office, and production area. Maintaining openness among functions to encourage good communications formed a major design consideration for the architects. “The project was restrained yet has great vigor and is visually exciting and complex,” the jury said. (Photo © Jeffery Jacobs, Architectural Photography Inc.)

Christ Community Medical Clinic is a new medical building for a nonprofit group whose goal was to create a positive, healing image and improve its neighborhood of light industrial buildings, churches, and apartments. The project, which sits amidst a 1960s strip shopping mall, serves the area’s underprivileged population. A skylight above the nurses’ station provides natural light and a place of orientation for the clinic. In presenting an Award of Merit for New Construction, The jury lauded the “quality of the interiors, integration of community through art,” and “degree of restraint.” (Photo © Jeffery Jacobs, Architectural Photography Inc.)

Burr wins Gassner Award
Eugene Burr, AIA, was honored with the Francis Gassner Award, the most prestigious AIA Memphis award for an individual. The award is given annually in commemoration of extraordinary architect Francis Gassner, who practiced from the 1950s until his death in 1977, and honors an architect or a member of a related profession for outstanding contributions to the quality of the built environment in Memphis. Burr led the AIA Memphis effort to produce the community outreach materials entitled “Outdoor Classrooms,” an educational video and teacher guide designed to stimulate young minds and get students and teachers thinking about their surroundings. He worked with the local school systems to develop the video, which was presented at the 2002 AIA National Convention. Burr also coordinated teacher in-service training sessions, organized the AIA “Barkitecture” Doghouse Design Competition, and spearheaded the AIA Memphis Career Day activities in local public schools. He currently chairs the AIA Memphis Architectural Explorer Post, which provides opportunities for students to explore architecture as a career path and exposes them to the effects design has on our environment. Burr teaches historic preservation seminars at Auburn University and community-related design studios at the University of Tennessee.

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