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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