WASHINGTON.- The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has awarded the recipients of the 2009 AIA Education Honor Awards for excellence in course development and architectural teaching. The Education Honor Awards program, created in 1988, recognizes collegiate faculty achievements and contributions to education and the discipline of architecture. The awards will be presented to the recipients during the 2009 AIA National Convention in San Francisco.

The jury looked for evidence of exceptional and innovative courses that dealt with broad issues, particularly in cross-disciplinary collaboration and/or within the broader community, contributed to the advancement of architecture education, had the potential to benefit and/or change practice, and promoted models of excellence that could be appropriated by other educators.

The Education Honor Award jury includes: Jury chair, Randy Byers, AIA, The Design Studio, Inc. Cheyenne, WY; Robert Campbell, FAIA, Architecture Critic, Cambridge, MA; Julie Eizenberg, AIA, KoningEizenberg, Santa Monica, CA; JW Blanchard, Assoc. AIA, President, American Institute of Architecture Students, Washington, DC; and Kate Schwennsen, FAIA, Iowa State University, Ames, IA and 2006 AIA President.

The 2009 AIA Education Honors Award Recipients:

Remediation as Urban Catalyst: A Collaborative Reworking of Post-Industrial Landscapes

John Comazzi (Assistant Professor of Architecture), Lance Neckar (Professor and Head of Landscape Architecture), Vince deBritto (Lecturer in Landscape Architecture)

University of Minnesota College of Design

This program represents the innovative research and collaborative work produced over two years of interdisciplinary, graduate design studios comprised of architecture and landscape architecture students from the University of Minnesota’s College of Design. Brought together to transform several brownfield sites, the efforts of these studios have begun to redirect a regional, systems-based approach to site remediation within a long stretch of the northern Mississippi River corridor. By confronting the deep and often messy histories of brownfield sites, they have embraced the future legacy of their industrial past as a source (if not resource) for innovations in teaching.

Integrated Project Studio (IPS)

Thomas Fowler, IV, AIA and Barry L.Williams, AIA

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

The IPS combines the content of a third year building design studio (BDS) and that of a building environmental systems studio (BES). The difficulty of synchronizing the environmental systems lecture topics (taught by another instructor), with the building design and environmental systems studios (one of ten sections) are formidable in such a short 10-week period. So instructors linked and tightly choreographed these two studios by framing the coursework into thirds, to emphasize to the third year students that environmental content is not distinct from building design.

Studio 804

Dan Rockhill, Distinguished Professor of Architecture

University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Planning

Studio 804, Graduate Design Studio VII, is a comprehensive graduate design/build studio. Operating as a not-for-profit incorporation, the studio focuses on the themes of urban renewal, sustainability, and elegant design to produce fully realized residences and structures. Students worked with many local architects, trades people, businesses and manufacturers to bring the project to fruition in a time period of one academic semester. The course is always approached as a student led process imbedded in the discovery method of teaching.

Architecture Summer Studio 2008: Intersections of Art and Architecture in Florence

Igor Marjanovic, Assistant Professor

Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

This program is an interdisciplinary design studio that includes students from architecture, engineering, cultural geography, and art. The studio allowed the students to learn about other cultures in a direct and rigorous way, preparing them to be global architectural practitioners and citizens of the world. Students were asked to embrace broad cultural issues by means of design, most notably by means of drawing, or disegno in Italian, which suggests both the drawing of a line on the page and the drawing forth of an idea.

The Everyday City

Wanda Dye, Assistant Professor

School of Architecture, University of Texas at Arlington

The Everyday City is a course that examines urban theories engaging the everyday, from the writings of Henri Lefebvre to contemporary critics. Through case study research and empirical observation, as well as the use of photographic and filmic techniques, the course attempts critical alternatives to [re]present and intervene within everyday public spaces. Through these spatial/temporal documentations, using images, sound and text, ideas of possible interventions within everyday public space emerge.