The Shed and Menil Drawing Institute among the winners of the 2022 AIA Architecture Awards

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has named the 11 winning projects of this year’s Architecture Awards, an annual program that “celebrates the best contemporary architecture and highlights the many ways buildings and spaces can improve lives.”

As always, the awardees are a geographically diverse bunch, spanning from Bentonville to Buffalo, Louisville to London, and represent singular projects across a range of budgets, sizes, styles, and building types. New construction, renovations, and restorations have all made the cut, and many of the winning projects have been previously profiled in-depth or awarded by AN. They include, among others, a LEED Gold-certified reimagining of a mid-century Pacific Northwest landmark, a mass timber high school in a former New England mill town, a multifaceted cultural hub on Manhattan’s West Side with a telescoping outer shell, and a superlatively resilient, ecologically sensitive educational center hugging the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.

Although submitted projects can be located anywhere in the world, the Architecture Awards are only open to projects designed by architecture and firms licensed in the United States and must have been completed relatively recently; since January 1, 2016, in this case. Submitted projects do not need to address all measures included in the 10-tenet Framework for Design Excellence, which was adopted in 2019 by the AIA as the “set of guidelines and requirements to assess project performance.” They are, however, required to “highlight how they perform in this context and highlight relevant narratives and metrics when applicable.”

This year’s nine-person award jury selected projects that “demonstrate design achievement, including a sense of place, purpose, history, and environmental sustainability,” according to the AIA’s press announcement. This 2022 AIA Architecture Award jury was comprised of: chair Susan Blomquist, AIA, Payette (Boston); L. William Zahner, Zahner (Kansas City, Missouri); Ana Astiazaran, AIAS, University of Arizona, Tucson; Dominique Hawkins, FAIA, Preservation Design Partnership (Philadelphia); Eddie Jones, FAIA, Jones Studio (Tempe, Arizona); Gia Mainiero, AIA, Dattner Architects (New York); Pierre Roberson, AIA, AECOM (Detroit); Gail Kubik, AIA, Finegold Alexander Architects (Salem, Massachusetts), and Heather Young, AIA, Heather Young Architects (Palo Alto, California).

Without further ado, here are the AIA’s 2022 Architecture Award-winning projects, with each project name linking back to its full Architecture Award profile:

Andlinger Center for Energy & the Environment | Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners (Princeton, New Jersey)

Billerica Memorial High School| Perkins&Will (Billerica, Massachusetts)

The Century Project at the Space Needle | Olson Kundig (Seattle)

Home Building at Thaden School | EskewDumezRipple (Bentonville, Arkansas)

Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design | Miller Hull Partnership in collaboration with Lord Aeck Sargent (Atlanta)

Marine Education Center at the University of Southern Mississippi | Lake|Flato Architects in collaboration with Unabridged Architecture (Ocean Springs, Mississippi)

Menil Drawing Institute | Johnston Marklee (Houston)

The Owsley Brown II History Center | de Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop (Louisville, Kentucky)

Richardson Olmsted Campus | Deborah Berke Partners with Flynn Battaglia, Goody Clancy (Buffalo, New York)

The Shed | Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group (New York City)

U.S. Embassy in London | KieranTimberlake (London)