By Russell Boniface
Associate Editor

Summary: AIA members and projects were recognized in both the June issue of Metropolitan Home and the June/July 2009 issue of Business Week SmallBiz.

Metropolitan Home’s Design 100 edition celebrates 100 of the best projects and products “from the many worlds that make up the design universe” to include buildings and homes, shops and restaurants, and various materials and green goods (including a solar-powered puppy). Many AIA members and projects are identified:

• Renzo Piano, Hon. FAIA, for the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Art Institute in Chicago.
• Cathedral of Christ the Light, Oakland, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, also a 2009 AIA Honor Award recipient.
• The Gentry Library, Gentry, Ark., by Marlon Blackwell, FAIA. also a 2009 AIA/ALA Library Award recipient.
• Jeanne Gang, FAIA. Gang’s firm, Studio Gang, experiments with innovative materials, forms, and sustainable technology in projects as diverse as SOS Children’s Villages Lavezzorio Community Center on the south side of Chicago to Aqua Tower, a sculptural, 82-story hotel and condo whose rippling terraces echo the profiles of weathered seaside cliffs. She is also garnering attention abroad, with visionary urban projects in the works from Hamburg to Hyderabad.
• New Acropolis Museum, Athens, by Bernard Tschumi, FAIA. Tschumi had to navigate an archaeological site unearthed during construction to design his home for the classical city’s prized antiquities. The concrete, steel, and glass building is sited with the Parthenon as a backdrop.
• Tom Kundig, FAIA, for his 575-square-foot cabin retreat in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen is a 2009 AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient.
• Lighting designer Hervé Descottes, for his work for Brooklyn water treatment plant—draping the structure, by Polshek partnership Architects, in a haze of bluish light. His company, L'Observatoire International, has lit buildings by Frank Gehry, FAIA, Steven Holl, AIA, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Descottes was recognized by the AIA with an Institute Honors for Collaborative Achievement award in 2003.

In the June/July 2009 SmallBiz section of BusinessWeek, an article entitled “The Inner City 100:True Grit” features Madeline Slay, AIA, and her San Antonio-based firm Madeline Anz Slay Architecture. Slay's company specializes in designing buildings for commercial contractors, with a small percentage of its work for local governments designing public school facilities and local universities. The firm has 15 employees and about $2 million in annual revenues, which she attributes to increased marketing efforts and partnerships. Slay prefers the commercial work, which pays better and more promptly, but she tells SmallBiz that the stability of government contracts can't be overlooked now. "It is what we have to do and where we are now," she says. Slay says she expects annual revenues to decline so she and her partners are getting creative about bringing in new business, including more government work. Slay hopes relationships will bring in work on planned facilities in higher education and a stadium to be built soon near Laredo, Tex.

Slay is also diversifying her own offerings, selling marketing services to commercial contractors for the buildings she designs. She creates brochures for the buildings to be leased. "So we become a one-stop shop for them," Slay says.