In the course of the AIA New York Chapter year, we always look forward to spring especially, when a new crop of Design Awards winners, the Honors and Awards Luncheon, and spring exhibitions herald our annual celebration of design excellence.
The Design Awards have a new jury every year, so no two rounds of winners are ever alike. As usual, this year’s honored projects span typologies, scales, and continents, and showcase the incredible reach and talent of our design community. International projects feature in most year’s groups of winners, but this year we’re particularly reminded of the global nature of practice in New York. I can’t help but look at the mix of winning projects and make connections between them and other issues on our minds. This publication comes at a fraught time for the meaning and notion of international cooperation, collaboration, and interdependence, with rapidly changing foreign policy, a volatile trade environment, and economic and political uncertainty all around us.
Our members are grappling with this uncertainty, trying to anticipate how the policy landscape may stop or slow projects, cause construction costs to skyrocket, jeopardize collaborations, and make practice more difficult in many other ways. None of us has the answers to these challenges or can perfectly anticipate what comes next. But as we have learned through many different troubling periods, it is at the intersection of creativity and community—where AIANY and the Center for Architecture do their most valuable work of convening—that we find the ideas and cooperation necessary to move forward.
And when it comes to convening, we have much work to do locally, even as we attempt to metabolize and respond to actions and declarations from the federal government. We are already speeding towards a primary election for mayor, to be held on Tuesday, June 24. As always, we encourage our members and colleagues to vote, and to connect with us and our advocacy resources to understand where candidates are on issues central to architectural practice. Congestion pricing, Local Law 97 implementation, procurement reform, the future of public space, the ongoing and dire need for more housing—these are all issues that AIANY continues to work in coalition with others to advance our goal of advocating for a just and sustainable city.
Architects, designers, and our collaborators here in New York are no strangers to shocking and challenging events that shift the ways we think, work, and build. Together we will meet this moment and push harder than ever to ensure that policymakers locally hear and value the knowledge and priorities of our community.
