by: AIA New York
Join us at the AIA New York Honors and Awards Luncheon, taking place on Friday, April 25, at Cipriani Wall Street, as we celebrate the recipients of prestigious AIA New York awards—the Medal of Honor, Champion of Architecture Medal, Architecture in Media Award, and New Perspectives Award—as well as the winners of the prestigious AIANY Design Awards 2025.
Reserve your seat at the Honors and Awards Luncheon >>
At this year’s event, the chapter will honor SHoP Architects with the Medal of Honor; Nico Kienzl with the Champion of Architecture Award; I Would Prefer Not To with the Architecture in Media Award; and Interboro Partners with the New Perspectives Award. Get to know the honorees below!
Medal of Honor
SHoP Architects
SHoP Architects is a New York-based global design leader, with iconic projects completed or underway across more than 100 million square feet on five continents.
Their 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; the museum at SITE Santa Fe; the National Veterans Resource Center at Syracuse University; a new academic building for the Fashion Institute of Technology; Hudson’s Detroit; a pair of celebrated New York City supertalls—111 West 57th Street and The Brooklyn Tower—and multiple diplomatic facilities for the U.S. Department of State.
The diverse, trendsetting and enduring work of the firm has been widely recognized with a variety of honors, among them the Smithsonian Institute’s National Design Award for Architecture. In 2021, SHoP became a 100-percent employee-owned company—furthering a commitment to a culture of innovation and the next-generation practice of architecture.
Champion of Architecture Award
Nico Kienzl
Kienzl is 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. He has shaped environmental performance and influenced the building industry towards sustainability. As Director, 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. His outstanding contributions and professional achievements in green building earned him the title of LEED Fellow.
Kienzl serves on the Board of Directors for the Urban Green Council and Architecture League of New York. He has been a Representative Member and Peer Reviewer for the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Green Building Federal Advisory Committee and GSA Design Excellence Program, respectively. Currently, he is an Industry Advisor for the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) for the U.S. Department of State.
Architecture in Media Award
I Would Prefer Not To
Ana Miljački is a historian, critic, curator and Professor of Architecture at MIT, where she directs the SMArchS program. In 2018, Miljački launched MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, engaged in critical, curatorial, and broadcasting work. She was one of three curators of the US Pavilion for the 14th Venice Biennale in 2014, with the project OfficeUS. Miljački is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), co-editor of the OfficeUS series of books, guest editor of Praxis 14: True Stories, the editor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern and Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Routledge, 2018), as well as of The Under the Influence symposium proceedings (Actar, 2019). She recently coedited LOG 54: Coauthoring with Ann Lui, and JAE titled Pedagogies for a Broken World, with Igor Marjanović and Jay Cephas. Critical Broadcasting Lab’s project The Pilgrimage | Pionirsko hodočašće was on view at Palazzo Mora in Venice from May to November 2023, and at the Timişoara Architecture Biennale: Beta in the fall of 2024. Since 2021, Critical Broadcasting Lab has been collaborating with the Architectural League of New York on a podcast titled: I Would Prefer Not To.
New Perspectives Award
Interboro Partners
Interboro is 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. In its early and formative years, Interboro received many significant awards, including the Museum of Modern Art PS1’s Young Architects Program, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award and Young Architects Award, and the AIA New York Chapter’s New Practices Award. Over the following decade, 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.