by Eugene C. Hopkins, FAIA
AIA President

“They’re always giving one another medals!”

That’s the rap—a bum one at that—you’ll hear from some of our colleagues in the industry. Even a few architects wonder out loud if we’re a bit too preoccupied with honors and awards.

Yes, I don’t know of an AIA chapter—national, state, or local—that doesn’t sponsor some sort of awards program. And, yes, when the popular media pay attention, they are more likely than not to talk about these events as little more than beauty contests, of winners and losers, of hot and not so hot, of this –ism versus that.

Design awards are a lot on my mind these days because each fall brings a bumper crop of press releases, news stories, magazine features, and awards banquets. You can’t avoid them.

What to make of it all? I mean, what is the value of all the work that goes into these programs—and let there be no doubt: it is a lot of work for everyone concerned.

Recently on a visit to the Institute’s national component headquarters in Washington, I opened the Board Room door a crack and saw a space piled high with project binders submitted by architects whose design reach can be global or just down the street. Sorting through approximately 650 submission binders were not one or two, but three separate juries focusing on design, interiors, and urban design. (AIArchitect readers will have to wait until early next year when they, and the former national president, will find out the results.)

In the meantime, however, there is plenty to feast on as state and local juries lay out before the profession and the public what in their estimation deserves to be considered among the brightest and best—as seen, for example, in the pages of Iowa Architect (Issue No. 04/247), which I found midway in the stack of mail on my desk when I flew back from Washington.

Here I found the predictably dramatic and carefully staged photographs of the projects being honored by the Iowa Chapter and Central States Regional Design Awards. But that was just the surface. There was, throughout, deep, persuasive evidence for why such programs are worth all the work that goes into them, that they are in fact important not only for the visibility of our profession or their status as best-practice case studies, but also—and this is key—as eloquent statements of our values, of what we think is important, of what we believe.

The vocabulary of excellence as spoken in the projects profiled in Iowa Architect includes words such as accessibility, craftsmanship, urbanity, sustainability, transparency, and economical. These are compelling values. They speak forcefully to clients and the public alike. They bring beauty off its artificial pedestal and integrate it into the everyday happenings of healthy and fulfilling community life from kitchens to parking facilities, from academic buildings to offices, apartments, and religious centers.

Yet, as Editor Steven Strassburg, AIA, points out, excellence is not a common quality that distinguishes our environment. If it were, awards programs would be superfluous. So why, asks Strassburg, do we need to concern ourselves “with something so intangible as excellence”? This is his answer:

I would like to suggest that by searching for more than what is routinely necessary we could gain an appreciation of architecture’s role in shaping our world and our life. Excellence begins in seeing how things can be better. Excellence serves to edify by giving examples of the human quest for the enrichment of our lives. (page 7)

Is our profession “preoccupied with honors and awards”?

I think Strassburg is spot on when he writes that our alleged “preoccupation” is not navel-gazing or self-congratulatory, but something different, something far more important. It’s nothing more or less than our profession’s contribution to the human quest for the enrichment of our lives. It’s about seeing how things can be better—and then making them so!

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