The American Architectural Foundation’s 16th annual Accent on Architecture Gala, held February 11 at the glorious National Building Museum in Washington, D.C, marked a moment in time to celebrate the past, present, and future power of architecture “to enrich and elevate the human spirit.” The gala, in which close to 1,000 people took part, also marked a time of leadership transition under this shared and celebrated belief.

AAF Board of Regents Chair Norbert W. Young, FAIA, offered a warm welcome to all gathered in the magnificent hall to honor this year’s Keystone Award, Architecture Firm Award, Twenty-five Year Award, and Gold Medal recipients. In his first year as chair, Young acknowledged the hard work and resulting accomplishments of his predecessor, Harold L. Adams, FAIA, RIBA, JIA, who served as Board of Regents chair for the previous four years.

Young also introduced the Foundation’s new National Education Initiative, which was detailed by Chad P. Wick, president and CEO of KnowledgeWorks, the AAF’s newest patron and partner in the Grade Schools by Design initiative. “Grade Schools by Design is not just about building the building,” Wick said. “It is about redefining the school as a multipurpose center that serves the whole neighborhood . . . In short, we want to change the way we think about the buildings that house our very future.”

AAF President and CEO Ronald E. Bogle acknowledged this year’s sponsors of Accent on Architecture and enumerated the many ways in which the Foundation works to increase understanding of the power of architecture, including the upcoming 2005 National Summit on School Design. In partnership with KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the summit will involve all stakeholders in school design to discuss and analyze how to improve the outcome for school design in the future.

Awards and Accolades

Ray Suarez, Washington-based senior correspondent for the Public Broadcasting Service’s The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, served as master of ceremonies and set an upbeat tone for the awards portion of the program.

Keystone Award
Young presented the Keystone Award, created in 1998 to recognize outstanding design leadership from outside of the design professions, to Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris, Hon. AIA. Harris, who currently serves as public director to the AIA, was nominated by AIA Honolulu for his work in uniting the public and private sectors together in the quest for sustainable design. As mayor in 1998, he reorganized the city government and created a community “visioning process,” through which thousands of citizens around the Island of Oahu have become involved.

“This award means the world to me,” Harris said. “What it represents is the impact that one architect can have on the revitalization of a city.” He then introduced the Honolulu architects in the audience who have greatly affected the city’s planning process and design within the last two decades.

A special award
Young and Bogle then presented a special gift—a hand-blown glass sculpture of the leafy “Accent A” logo—to outgoing AIA Executive Vice President Norman L. Koonce, FAIA, who was the co-creator of Accent on Architecture in 1990 when he was serving as AAF president.

Koonce, visibly moved by the award and the standing ovation that followed, told the gathering that he had assembled for the evening a special table of people who had taken part in the original gala, including Accent on Architecture co-creator Sylvester Damianos, FAIA, who served as 1990 AIA president, and Dr. Robert Schuller, minister of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., who commissioned the cathedral from the late Gold Medalist Philip Johnson. “Architecture can never be properly acknowledged apart from the people it serves,” Koonce reminded the audience. “I want to thank you for your special stewardship of the built environment.”

Architecture Firm Award
Steidl presented the Architecture Firm Award citation to Helmut Jahn, FAIA, principal and representative of Murphy/Jahn, Chicago. The award represents the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years. Murphy/Jahn has won 12 AIA Honor Awards and more than 60 local awards, and, as Suarez said, “They design Big and Smart.”

“I know that this award is for our work, but I also look at it as a challenge to produce architecture that is formally sophisticated, very technologically advanced, and environmentally sustainable,” Jahn stated. Jahn, who joined the firm in 1981, told of its history, which dates back to its founding by C.F. Murphy in 1912, and thanks the “many people who have been part of the firm for a long time . . . An event like Accent on Architecture makes us aware of how important architecture is and can be.”

Twenty-five Year Award
AIA Gold Medalist Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn., received the 2005 Twenty-five Year Award honoring structures of enduring significance that were completed 25 to 35 years ago. Begun in 1973, one year before Kahn’s death, and opened to the public in 1977, the Yale Center for British Art is among Kahn’s finest creations. In the Yale Center, “light was a building material and no one used it better,” Suarez commented.

Amy Meyers, the Yale Center’s director and Anthony Pellecchia, principal Pellecchia & Meyers, the firm that was formed to complete the Yale Center for British Art after Kahn’s death in 1974, accepted the award from President Steidl on behalf of the building, to the delight and approval of the audience. Meyers said that the center stands as the “model for inspiring the most profound of conversations. A conservation plan currently is being drafted,” she said, “to make sure the building continues to delight in perpetuity.” Pellecchia added that “a building of this quality needed a client of this quality . . . even after 30 years; Lou Kahn’s work is still relevant.”

Gold Medal
This special evening reached its apex with the awarding of the AIA Gold Medal, conferred upon an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. Architect-engineer-artist Santiago Calatrava, FAIA, the 61st Gold Medal recipient, received two standing ovations in acknowledgement of the soaring structural poetry he has created in bridges and buildings.

Suarez characterized Calatrava’s buildings as possessing “a soaring spirit like no other. Rarely has technology been placed in service so beautifully.”

Steidl and Koonce presented the medal to Calatrava, who said, “It is very difficult for me to speak of the emotion I feel now. Your welcome and your warmth are overwhelming.”

Calatrava also spoke of the importance of acknowledging from where architecture has come and respecting the fine traditions that inexorably have led to the profession we have today. He noted that architecture is one of the few professions that go by a Greek name (from “arch,” meaning first, and “tectum,” meaning builder.) “Our profession still bears the responsibility of being first in the building process,” he reminded the audience. The idea evolved through Vitruvius’s definition of architect as firmitas, utilitas, venustas, the familiar-to-this-day “firmness, commodity, and delight.”

One could argue, Calatrava posited, that the noble mission of the architect goes back to the Book of Exodus from the Bible: “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of workmanship.” Architecture is God’s spirit, a spirit much greater than our own, Calatrava concluded. We know our past for which we must be responsible. We began as the first among workers, and we must proceed through a combination of pride and humility.

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