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Earlier this month on the final evening of its 2024 Conference on Architecture & Design, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) presented awards across nine different categories during a red carpet–style gala held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (AIA members receiving fellowships were also honored during the conference-concluding event).

This approach to announcing the winners of a bulk of the AIA’s project-based award programs is markedly different than in past years when recipients were revealed at different, staggered times throughout the year, such as the Earth Day–pegged COTE Top Ten awards. While the change-up certainly made for a bigger, more celebratory bash during the conference, the all-at-once tactic perhaps caused the winning projects to get lost in the mix. (Chatter of scandal involving top AIA brass throughout the run of the conference didn’t help, and this new arrangement of announcing awards was among the grievances of some firms.)

The Tokyo International Forum’s Glass Hall. Photo © Kawasumi-Kobayashi Kenji Photograph Office

In addition to the COTE Top Ten, the illustrious Twenty-Five Year Award was also presented to Rafael Viñoly Architects’ Tokyo International Forum (1996) during the June 7 ceremony—a fitting tribute to the enduring allure of the swooping, steel-and-glass exhibition center itself but also to the firm’s charismatic founder who died in March 2023. Other recent winners of the long-running Twenty-Five Year Award include Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Steven Holl’s Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle.

Marion Fire Station No. 1. Photo © Cameron Campbell

Many of the 80 award-winning projects recognized at the gala have been featured in the pages of RECORD. This includes seven in the most esteemed annual prize category, the Architecture Award, which recognizes the best new contemporary works of architecture of any size, style, or type. They are: Studio Gang’s Arkansas Museum of Fine Art in Little Rock; the Center for Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, by Susan T Rodriguez and OPAL; the John A. Paulson Center at NYU by KieranTimberlake and Davis Brody Bond (also a Education Facility Design Award winner); OPN Architects’ Marion Fire Station No. 1 in Iowa; Princeton University Residential Colleges by TenBerke (also a Housing Award winner); SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park in Los Angeles by HKS with Studio-MLA; and the Thaden School Performing Arts Center in Bentonville, Arkansas, by Marlon Blackwell Architects with campus master-planning by EskewDumezRipple.

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Thaden School Performing Arts Center (1), Center for Human Ecology at the College of the Atlantic (2), Princeton University Residential Colleges. Photos © Timothy Hursley (1), Jen Holt Photography (2), Chris Cooper (3)

Other 2024 Architecture Award winners include One Vanderbilt in Midtown Manhattan (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates), the San Antonio Botanical Garden (Weddle Gilmore Architects), the Student Success District at the University of Arizona (Miller Hull Partnership), Seattle’s Wagner Education Center at the Center for Wooden Boats (Olson Kundig), and the VMDO Architects–led renovation of George Washington University’s Thurston Hall, a triple-winner also recognized in the COTE Top Ten and Housing Award categories. (The D.C.- and Charlottesville, Virginia-based firm also scored awards for primary school projects in the COTE Top Ten and Educational Facility Design award programs.)

Also winning an Architecture Award for Austin’s Holdsworth Center was another multi-category honoree, Lake|Flato Architects, whose founders, David Lake and Ted Flato, were honored as 2024’s AIA Gold Medalists.

In addition to the Architecture Award, RECORD-featured projects extend into the other categories. Among them: 

Interior Architecture Awards: EskewDumezRipple and Wolf Ackerman’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs in Charlottesville; Luce et Studio Architects’ Mingei International Museum in San Diego, and David Geffen Hall by Diamond Schmitt and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in New York. Full list of winners

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Center of Developing Entrpreneurs (4), David Geffen Hall (5). Photos © Alan Karchmer (4), Michael Moran (5)

Housing Awards: Ten Berke’s Princeton University Residential Colleges; MIT Site 4 by NADAAA with Perkins&Will; Field Architecture’s Madrone Ridge in Healdsburg, California; and Cooperwood Senior Living in Flowood, Mississippi, which is discussed in the latest DESIGN:ED podcast featuring architects Anne Marie Duvall Decker and Roy Decker of Duvall Decker. Full list of winners

Madrone Ridge. Photo © Joe Fletcher

Small Project Awards: Sylvan Scrapple by After Architecture, on view during the fourth cycle of Exhibit Columbus in Columbus, Indiana. Full list of winners

Winning projects in other categories, including the Educational Facility Design Awards, Regional & Urban Design Awards, and Healthcare Design Awards, can be viewed here.