Seattle Design Firm LMN Wins 2016 National Architecture Firm Award from AIA
The Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) voted for LMN Architects to receive the 2016 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The AIA Architecture Firm Award, given annually, is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years. The firm will be honored at the 2016 AIA National Convention in Philadelphia.
Founded in 1979, by George Loschky, FAIA, Jud Marquardt, FAIA, and John Nesholm, FAIA, LMN has nurtured a commitment to civic life, exploring the potential of architecture to strengthen the identity of the city and its communities, creating vivid places that bring people together around culture, the performing arts, education, and civic amenity.
Based in Seattle, the firm now numbers 145 employees—architects, interior designers, urban planners, computer scientists, and administrative specialists. Interconnected themes emerge from the firm’s culture, collaborative process, and realization of transformative urban projects. Convention center projects in Vancouver, Cleveland, and Cincinnati form iconic gestures of civic identity well beyond the buildings’ limits, expanding civic engagement and bringing together diverse communities. Performing arts centers in Seattle, Memphis, and San Antonio perform similar feats of civic enrichment, opening the arts to the community in vibrant gestures that embrace the city itself as a participant in the drama of the performance event. Higher education projects on campuses such as the University of Washington, University of California, San Diego, and University of Iowa address the aspirations of these clients for neighborhood and district-scale responses. Civic infrastructure projects, including key design for the Seattle metro area’s first-ever regional light rail system, scale up the approach, transforming them into landmark solutions. In each case, LMN has used complex programmatic buildings to bind together ill-defined urban districts.
“LMN Architects exemplify the best in architecture firm culture,” said 2015 AIA President Elizabeth Chu Richter, FAIA. “Not only is their work proof of this, but the amazing talent they are cultivating will have a reverberating impact on the profession for years to come.”
“Through their design of several significant urban theaters and convention centers that are thoroughly wed to the life of our cities, LMN provides an altogether different vision of a fully sustainable and civic minded future that embraces urban life,” wrote Stephen Kieran, FAIA, of 2008 AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient Kieran Timberlake, in a recommendation letter.
A few of their most notable projects include:Â
Vancouver Convention Centre West is the winner of 19 design awards nationally and internationally–including the AIA Institute Honor Award in all 3 categories. The world’s first LEED Platinum convention center encompasses at once a singular building, an urban district, a public park and gathering place, and a “front porch” for the city on one of the most unique building sites in North America.
The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business in Seattle, where a four- story, daylit atrium runs the entire length of PACCAR Hall and cultivates a new standard of social performance. Multiple entrances are knitted into the pedestrian flow of the campus, with views, topography, and landscape embraced as integrated elements in the architectural experience.
The Burnham Mall, Cleveland Convention Center, and Global Center for Health Innovation in Cleveland, which reinvigorates Daniel Burnham’s 1907 City Beautiful plan by placing a monumental civic park space on top of a new convention center facing Lake Erie, seamlessly weaving together a major public assembly building with a city park.
The Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, an addition and renovation of the 1926 Spanish Mission-style Municipal Auditorium, inserts a new hall within the footprint of the existing building, creating space for a new studio theater while also forming a new exterior plaza facing the River Walk. For the first time in history, this civic building makes an inviting public connection to San Antonio’s treasured River Walk, opening up the arts to the entire community.
LMN Architects is the 53rd AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient. Previous recipients of the AIA Firm Award include, Ehrlich Architects (2015), Eskew + Dumez + Ripple (2014), Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (2013), VJAA (2012), Lake| Flato (2004), Gensler (2000), Perkins & Will (1999), Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (1994), and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (1962).
About The American Institute of ArchitectsÂ
Founded in 1857, members of the American Institute of Architects consistently work to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings, neighborhoods, and communities. Through nearly 300 state and local chapters, the AIA advocates for public policies that promote economic vitality and public well being. Members adhere to a code of ethics and conduct to ensure the highest professional standards. The AIA provides members with tools and resources to assist them in their careers and business as well as engaging civic and government leaders, and the public to find solutions to pressing issues facing our communities, institutions, nation and world. Visit www.aia.org.
More information about LMN can be accessed from their website: www.lmnarchitects.com
