by: AIA New York
On Friday, April 12, 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 22 winners of the 2024 AIANY Design Awards, the Luncheon serves as one of the organization’s largest fundraisers.
This year’s event gathered a record 750 members and supporters who came together to raise over $405,000 in support of AIA New York, the largest amount ever raised by this event. These funds allow our chapter to continue to provide programs on critical issues in the design community and beyond, to mount exhibitions that share the work of our members with the public and fellow design professionals, and to advocate for the role of architects and the importance of design in the public realm.
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 Madame Architect, a digital magazine focused on the extraordinary women that shape our world—women from all over the globe, all corners of the field, and all stages of career. MA features intimate interviews, day-in-the-life profiles, essays, reviews, and a historical column, all through a female perspective. In addition to architects, features include CEOs, journalists, civic leaders, landscape architects, and many more experts in the field.
Accepting the award on behalf of the MA team was founder Julia Gamolina, who reflected on her journey starting out in New York City as a woman working in the built environment. “When I looked at design media, I wasn’t often seeing those more personal, career development stories I was looking for. And when I did see some semblance of that, they weren’t often with women,” Gamolina said. “When I turned to women’s interest magazines, I hardly ever saw any architects featured, or any other women working in the built environment. There was this clear content overlap that was missing.” Through asking questions, meeting mentors, and connecting with other women in the field, she realized how powerful sharing these conversations would be. “On the one hand, they can be used to guide the next generation, and on the other, they can showcase the work of those whose work so far has been undertold.”
The next award presented was the Champion of Architecture Medal, 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 2024 Champion of Architecture was Jonathan F.P. Rose, recognized for his business, public policy, teaching, research, writing, and not-for-profit work creating more environmentally, socially, and economically resilient cities. In 1989, Rose founded and became President of Jonathan Rose Companies LLC, a real estate development and investment firm that acquires and develops affordable and mixed-income housing.
In his acceptance speech, Rose reflected on his journey from first getting started in his profession to present day. He concluded by emphasizing the importance of building community with one another. “All of us, everyone in this room, are fiduciaries for the future residents, office workers, occupants, performers, attendants, hospital patients, everybody else who actually lives, works, plays,” Rose said. “We are fiduciaries for them. Our hope is we collectively can create a culture based in altruism that encourages design and development for the benefit of all life.”
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 Nina Cooke John, AIA, NOMA. She is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design, a multidisciplinary design studio that values placemaking as a way to transform relationships between people and the built environment.
Accepting her award, Cooke John recognized and thanked all the clients, community partners, consultants, engineers, teammates, and cultural institutions that empower her line of work. She called upon professionals in the room—”I urge you, the architects in the room, to release what we might call this ‘snobbery’ in the profession. To release this clinging to and safeguarding of our beloved traditions and ways of working, learned through initiation of architecture school and beyond,” she said. “Think not of what you might lose, but of what we might gain when we open up the doors of our club, and look beyond the architecture field to inform our practice. Destroying siloes and expanding the spectrum across which we work, each informs the other. The result is not a neutralizing meeting in the middle, but an enriching act of leaning into all the possibilities of us. From this new perspective, we see new ways of working with the materials that we use, new ways of understanding the scale at which you might have an impact, new ways of looking and seeing people and their communities, welcoming into the fold those with lived knowledge to share equal footing at an expanded table.”
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 MARVEL. The firm recognizes that the pressing issues facing contemporary cities, communities, and the natural environment can only be solved with bold, collective action. Although the team just celebrated its 10th year as MARVEL, they have a trajectory of over three decades working at the intersection of public and private space, creating intentionally timeless design solutions that integrate nature and context.
MARVEL founder Jonathan Marvel began by expressing his gratitude for the design community in New York. “As architects, we’re not always recognized for the work we do, and that’s what makes this award from our peers so special,” Marvel said. “The mantra at MARVEL is ‘Design everywhere, for Everyone’ and we try to live by that everyday. Architecture, as you know, is the balancing act between creativity and service, and this award reaffirms why we creatively serve everyone, everywhere, all the time. A hallmark of our design and construction process is really in the listening and the collaborating. That word ‘collaboration’ really defines who we are as a practice. We do hear a collective voice that comes out of conversations that we have in the office with each other, with our communities, our cities, our clients, and it gives agency to everyone on the planet when you extend it out to that scale.”
Thank you to all who helped make our 2024 Luncheon a smashing success! Be sure to stop by the 2024 AIANY Design Awards exhibition, on view at the Center for Architecture from May 2 through September 3, 2024.