Architecture Notebook

2011 Honor Award for Architecture
UCSF Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building, San Francisco, CA

Architect: Rafael Viñoly Architects with SmithGroup

Given that the building was to be located on a steeply sloping site at the foot of Mount Sutro, the client expected a vertical building organization, which might not have been well fitted to the institute’s research needs. Stemming from the belief that a horizontal scheme is best for interior lab organization and for research collaboration, the architect found a way to plan a horizontal building despite the challenging site.

2011 Maybeck Award
Steven D. Ehrlich, FAIA – Ehrlich Architects

Ehrlich’s design philosophy, which he calls Multicultural Modernism, began to evolve during six post-university years of practicing and teaching architecture in Morocco and West Africa in the 1970s. During this time, he observed the ways that indigenous buildings shared an economy of means and sustainable strategies for adapting to their harsh climates. He also admired how African cities and towns fulfilled social needs and expressed deeply-held cultural values of their communities

25 Year Award – Monterey Bay Aquarium
EHDD Architecture

It is a formal masterwork—the rare building (and almost unique for its time) that is frankly contemporary while gracefully complementing its historic context in its inventive use of the materials and forms of Monterey’s Cannery Row. As the 1988 AIA Honor Awards Jury commented, “With great spirit, humility, nobility, and intelligence, this poetic waterside aquarium celebrates both the life in the sea and the life its coastal community has drawn from the sea. It is completely unpretentious and unselfconscious, drawing people to its sympathetic and respectful portrayal of sea life through the power of its Cannery imagery ”

The American Institute of Architects, California Council (AIACC) announces David Baker, FAIA, as the 2012 AIACC Distinguished Practice Award recipient. This annual award recognizes significant contributions and accomplishments toward a specific building type or practice area, as well as an individual architect’s work, and their responses to challenges, and innovations within the design and construction process, creating design excellence, through a collaborative spirit. This award recognizes a career of dedicated commitment to the built environment.

Established in 1982, David Baker + Partners (DB+P) is best known for the design of environmentally and socially sustainable affordable housing that fosters a lively sense of community. Working with partners Peter MacKenzie and Kevin Wilcock, founder David Baker, FAIA, has pioneered tactics that have significantly changed the way planners, developers, tenants, and neighbors approach such projects. Baker and his firm’s primary tactic is thinking not “outside the box”, but outside the building: conceiving the project as part of the holistic fabric of the block, neighborhood, or city.

Baker’s firm has received more than 150 national and local design awards, including most recently two national Housing Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), for Tassafaronga Village in Oakland, California, and Armstrong Place Senior + Family Housing in San Francisco; an AIA/HUD Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Affordable Housing Design for Paseo Senter in San Jose; and an Award of Excellence from the Home Depot Foundation for Folsom + Dore Supportive Apartments in San Francisco, recognizing “Affordable Housing Built Responsibly.”

Baker’s work is characterized by the integration of simple, dependable, energy conserving practices, with provision for future enhancement as technologies continue to develop, while embracing emerging, sustainable materials and systems, crafting colorful, multi-use urban communities, which bring vitality to their surroundings.

David Baker travels widely, giving lectures on green, high-density housing and leading awards juries, design charrettes, and workshops regarding creative solutions to the increasingly dire problem of the world’s carbon footprint. The firm has been an early, and continuing participant in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Pilot Programs, and supports its creative staff in acquiring LEED Accredited Professional education, to create an ongoing legacy of humane and sustainable practice among architects, and designers of the future.

The AIACC congratulates David Baker on his impressive accomplishment.

 
Highlights from this time last year include a maze filled with mirrors, an electric car powered by jet engines and a hotel room that looks more like a bird’s nest. (more…)

 
Highlights from this time last year include a maze filled with mirrors, an electric car powered by jet engines and a hotel room that looks more like a bird’s nest. (more…)

Designed in Hackney: we conclude our week of fashion design from Hackney with Hussein Chayalan and his dresses that emit laser beams.  (more…)

 
This week Dezeen has been all about skyscrapers, with towers by 15 of the world’s most famous architects for a new business district in Seoul plus a timelapse movie and interview with architect Renzo Piano as his 300 metre-high tower The Shard nears completion in London. (more…)

As The Shard nears completion in London, here is the transcript of an interview conducted with architect Renzo Piano before work started on the 300 metre-high tower.  (more…)