In late June, just over 12,000 people attended the first AIA convention since 2019, in Chicago. Besides being back, in a great city, after the Covid hiatus, what made this year’s convention notable was that three years’ worth of AIA honorees were all celebrated together. And the spotlight on those architects happens to signal real promise for the profession going forward.
For most of its century-long history, the AIA Gold Medal was bestowed on white men, of course, often of a venerable age. When pressure mounted in the last decade to diversify the award, the AIA seemed only able to come up with architects who were already dead—Julia Morgan in 2014 and Paul Revere Williams in 2017.
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