by: AIA New York
On Friday, April 25, AIA New York and its supporters gathered at Cipriani Wall Street for the annual Honors and Awards Luncheon, which celebrated architects, professionals, and media influencers committed to the improvement and growth of New York City’s architecture community. In addition to recognizing the 23 winners of the 2025 AIANY Design Awards, the Luncheon serves as one of the organization’s largest fundraisers. This year’s event gathered over 650 members and supporters who came together to raise over $355,000 in support of AIA New York. These funds allow our chapter to develop our programming and cultivate a future-forward architectural community.
The first award conferred at the Luncheon was the Architecture in Media Award, formerly known as the Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award. Since 2003, the award has honored those who set new standards for communicating the value of architecture to a wider community. This year, the Architecture in Media Award honored I Would Prefer Not To, a podcast which features audio interviews about the many reasons that architects choose to turn down potential commissions, as well as the politically relevant lessons contained in these decisions to not engage.
Accepting the award on behalf of I Would Prefer Not To was founder Ana Miljački, a historian, critic, curator and Professor of Architecture at MIT. In 2018, Miljački launched MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, engaged in critical, curatorial, and broadcasting work. Since 2021, Critical Broadcasting Lab has been collaborating with the Architectural League of New York on the podcast. “I have to thank all of the architects who have agreed to talk to me along the way, they took a risk to do that,” Miljački said. “Indeed, we do put on the record decisions to refuse commissions. But I also hope that the podcast, in a way, highlights the humility and the kind of humanity of what it takes to practice architecture daily.”
The next award presented was the Champion of Architecture Award, first awarded to R. Buckminster Fuller in 1952, which recognizes an individual outside the architectural profession for their contributions to architecture and the built environment. The 2025 Champion of Architecture was Nico Kienzl, the founding director of Atelier Ten’s New York City office and member of Atelier Ten’s US and international leadership group. With over 20 years of sustainability consulting experience, he excels in the application of advanced building analysis for façade optimization, daylight and shading analysis, and optimization of building systems.
Kienzl has made significant contributions to residential, commercial, institutional, cultural, and masterplan projects in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, shaping environmental performance and influencing the building industry towards sustainability. He has consulted on over 150 high-performance building projects, including the first LEED Platinum condominium in New York City and the first LEED Platinum university campus under LEED-ND.
Accepting the award, Kienzl urged attendees to focus on the challenge of climate change. “This award is particularly meaningful to me because I sincerely believe that sustainability and great architecture, great architects, are inseparably linked. Nothing is less sustainable than a building that is torn after a few years because it’s become either functionally or aesthetically obsolete,” Kienzl said. “We all in this room bear enormous responsibility for the deployment of an impact on environmental resources through the decisions we make everyday. The climate crisis is the defining crisis of our generation, and we must not be distracted or dismayed in our resolve to rise to this challenge. There is no alternative because there is no backup planet. But I’m inherently an optimist because I don’t think you can ever get to a better outcome with a negative mindset. And I do genuinely believe that we live in the most exciting time in the history of the built environment.”
The program’s third award was the recently created New Perspectives Award, which celebrates individuals or collectives who, through their own recently published or curated work, take unique, critical positions that contribute to the broader understanding of architecture. This year’s recipient was Interboro Partners, a New York City-based design and research office that has redefined critical urban practice. Operating between planning, architecture, and public art, Interboro develops new ideas out of careful observation of places, and in open conversation with the people who inhabit them. A goal of Interboro’s work is to design interesting, effective tools that bring different perspectives into planning processes and projects.
The office has scaled from conceptual projects to large-scale urban and infrastructure planning projects and built public spaces that stay true to the conceptual ambition and the ethics of the practice’s early work. Throughout, Interboro has written and developed exhibitions about topics such as shrinking cities, aging-in-place, urban heat, planned communities, recycling and reuse, and access in the built environment. Interboro’s Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion was published by Actar in 2017 and 2021. Interboro is led by partners Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore, AIA.
Principal and cofounder Theodore received the award on behalf of the firm, saying, “I think people often think of architectural practice as a practice of designing and making, and for us, architectural practice really begins with looking, with looking very carefully—really trying to suspend judgement, and to really try to understand a place or city in which we’re working, to try to discover the most incredible things and unexpected places for architecture to get involved in.” She noted that receiving this award this year in particular, under AIANY President Benjamin Gilmartin’s theme See You IRL: Designing for Public Life, is especially meaningful: “New perspectives also speaks to us on another level, which is that it speaks to our ambition to want to bring new perspectives, new people, new actors, new voices into the design process. And especially people and actors who have historically been excluded from design processes. We believe that by doing that, we are actually making the design process itself more public.”
The day’s final award was the Medal of Honor, the Chapter’s highest distinction, conferred to an architect or architecture firm for a distinguished body of work and high professional standing. This year, the Medal of Honor was awarded to SHoP Architects, a New York-based global design leader, with iconic projects completed or underway across more than 100 million square feet on five continents.
The practice forefronts the activation of dynamic public spaces, the use of technology to revolutionize the process of design and visualization, and an emphasis on the research and deployment of new methods that simplify and accelerate project delivery. Some notable SHoP projects include Manhattan’s East River Waterfront promenade; Brooklyn’s Barclays Center arena; headquarters complexes for Uber, YouTube, Atlassian and Volvo; a new academic building for the Fashion Institute of Technology; and a pair of celebrated New York City supertalls—111 West 57th Street and The Brooklyn Tower.
The diverse, trendsetting, and enduring work of the firm has been widely recognized with a variety of honors. In 2021, SHoP became a 100% employee-owned company—furthering a commitment to a culture of innovation and the next-generation practice of architecture.
Founding Principals Gregg Pasquarelli, FAIA, and Bill Sharples accepted the award on behalf of SHoP. “I think about where we are today in the world,” Sharples said. “If people are going to solve the challenges that we’re facing, whether it’s climate change, geopolitics, construction, housing crisis, it’s the people in this room—the architects, engineers, builders, developers. We are problem solvers, we are in the game. That’s what makes me personally, as well as my partners, so excited to be architects in this great city.”
Also honored were the 23 Design Awards winners, including this year’s Best in Competition, Kaohsiung Port Terminal by Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture DPC, celebrated for its dynamic functionality linking the city and sea.
Thank you to all who helped make our 2025 Luncheon such a success! Be sure to stop by the 2025 AIANY Design Awards exhibition, on view at the Center for Architecture from May 8 through September 2, 2025, to explore the 23 winning projects.