2024 Award Recipients

Angela Brooks
Principal
Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Inc

Angie was the first woman ever to be awarded the AIA California Maybeck Award and is a powerful advocate for the rich, multivalent impact of good design. Angela sees architecture as an instrument for the triple bottom line and the delivery vehicle for space that encourages communities to flourish. She has pursued advancing ideas beyond buildings that promote larger societal wellbeing through policy organizations and she has worked selflessly for her profession through the local, state and national organizations. She is a recognized leader in the field of environmental and social-equity design and is responsible for her firm’s development in the area of housing and policy, leading initiatives and overall firm management. Practicing architecture since 1991, she has garnered mainstream recognition in print and media, such as Newsweek Magazine and her USA Network 2010 Character Approved Award; she co-founded a non-profit to promote good policy, density and livable communities and she lectures extensively on these topics. Angela received the National AIA Young Architects Award in 2009 and her firm has received more than twenty National AIA Awards, six Top Ten Green (COTE) Awards, the State of California and National AIA Architecture Firm of the Year Award in 2010, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture in 2014, the HIVE 50 Innovator Award in 2017 and 2020 and the 2022 National AIA Gold Medal, the AIA’s highest honor, for their "pioneering brand of architecture that profoundly enriches the human experience." Angela was 2018 Chair of the National AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE), developing programs and advocating for policy changes at the Federal level-promoting design that achieves high levels of performance. In 2020, Angie received recognition as a Citizen Architect by AIA National, was awarded the 2020 AIALA Presidential Citizen Architect Award and the 2020 Maybeck Award for exemplary achievement in architectural design and ‘a different kind of legacy’. Angie and her partner Larry recently received the 2022 AIA Gold Medal, for their significant influence on the theory and practice of architecture.

Mimi Hoang, AIA
Co-Founding Partner
nARCHITECTS

Mimi co-founded nARCHITECTS with Eric Bunge with a belief in architecture as an agent of positive change that can connect people and environments in unexpected ways. An ambition to respond to changes in contemporary life while fostering social engagement guides her work. Born in the tropics of Vietnam and trained in Amsterdam and New York City, she brings a global outlook and an obsession with greenery to the firm’s design culture.

Mimi teaches graduate design studios as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and previously taught at Yale and Harvard Universities. She received her Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Toni L. Griffin
Founder
urbanAC

Toni L. Griffin is founder of urban American city (urbanAC LLC), a planning and design practice working with public, private, and nonprofit partners to reimage, reshape, and rebuild more just cities and communities. urbanAC leads transformative projects rooted in addressing historic and current disparities involving race, class, and culture. The firm has collaborated with cities on the cusp of just social and economic recovery including strategic city plans for Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, as well as equitable public realm designs for Rochester and St. Louis.

Ms. Griffin is also Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and is founding director of the Just City Lab, a research platform that investigates how design’s impact on social and spatial justice in cities. Toni has also served as strategic advisor to several philanthropic organizations including The Heinz Endowments and Bloomberg Philanthropies, each looking to more deeply embed principles of just and equitable impact into their funding and evaluation criteria for investing in urban development, wealth creation and capacity building.

Toni’s current practice is built upon her early expertise and experience as a licensed architect and Associate Partner at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and later as a public official serving in senior planning and community development director roles in Washington, DC and Newark, New Jersey working to shape equitable growth and design excellence. She has authored articles on design justice, including co-editor of The Just City Essays and has received numerous awards, including the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award. She has lectured extensively in the US, Netherlands, South Africa, and South America, and served as an Obama Presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts.

Susan Jones
Principal Architect
atelierjones

Susan Jones, FAIA, is founder of Seattle-based atelierjones. Devoted to disrupting 20th century design and construction methodologies, her award-winning, all-woman owned and woman-led firm drives new lower-carbon pathways within architecture and construction at scale. Advancing lower-carbon prefabricated mass timber systems, for over a decade, the firm has completed over a dozen mass timber projects, and has designed over twenty, from institutional buildings to large-scale urban housing to urban infill housing, single-family homes and rural/WUI mass timber modular housing. atelierjones’ national leadership in multiple international collaborations and research creates sustainable change at scale. Collaborating, the firm leads nationally and internationally, seeking transparency and rigor on multiple levels, from forest health to LCA collaborations to fire testing to regulatory code design to award-winning design projects that introduce immersive, biophilic experiences for all.

A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, Susan grew up in Bellingham, Washington. She earned her B.A from Stanford in Philosophy, and her M.Arch from Harvard GSD and is Affiliate Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington, Susan is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and was awarded the AIASeattle Gold Medal in 2023.

Kate Simonen
Founding Director
Carbon Leadership Forum

Kate Simonen is founding Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum and a Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. Licensed as an architect and structural engineer, she connects significant professional experience in high performance building design and technical expertise in environmental life cycle assessment to spur collective action to bring net embodied carbon to zero through cutting-edge research, cross-sector collaboration, and the incubation of new approaches.

She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, an honorary fellow of the UK's Institution of Structural Engineers and was named Engineering News Record Top 25 Newsmaker in 2020 for her impact rallying industry to reduce embodied carbon. Under her leadership, the Carbon Leadership Forum has grown to become globally recognized for advancing embodied carbon data, methods and policy as well as inspiring and empowering collective action in the building sector through advances in low carbon data, methods and policies.