AIA Announces 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: Barclays Global Investors’ new headquarters office embraces innovation within a professional environment through thoughtful, sophisticated design and provides the infrastructure necessary to meet the firm’s significant technological demands. The design encourages collaboration and interaction, interspersing break areas within work areas, and offers a variety of meeting spaces.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Benny Chan / Fotoworks

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: Designed for a popular San Francisco-based publishing company, Chronicle Books’ new home reflects its strong communal values, fosters innovation, and responds to its unique relationship to books. In support of the office’s workflow, new circulation between floors provides intuitive access and visual connections. The varied spaces create an open, charged social atmosphere while preserving personal space for quietness and concentration.
Photo courtesy AIA/David Wakely

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: Commissioned by the Heckscher Foundation for Children, this project transforms a stoic neo-Georgian townhouse built in 1902 in New York City into a modern interior for the foundation’s administration, providing offices, a boardroom, and small conference spaces. By cutting a shaft of daylight from the ground floor to rooftop, the organization of the building’s activity is centered on a single gesture of light and space.
Photo courtesy Elizabeth Felicella

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: Recycling a single-story suburban house located on a busy corner site, Jigsaw introverts itself in a continuous spatial flow around an open-air courtyard carved from the home's remains. A matrix of spaces is linked through the building; stories merge and rooms relate to each other as they rise and fall in a series of interlocked puzzle-like volumes.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Nic Lehoux

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: R.C. Hedreen Company’s new office goes beyond practice to a transformative experience that creates a new kind of environment for conducting business. The project called for a complete remodel of the second floor in Seattle’s 1927 Art-Deco Olympic Tower building and transitioned the company from a small, traditional office space to a large, open environment offering functionality and sophistication.
Photo courtesy Tim Soar

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: The expansion project for the School of American Ballet is located in the facilities of the official training academy for the New York City Ballet. The 8,200-square-foot project includes the addition of two new dance studios within the space of two existing ones. Like nesting dolls, each of the new studios is housed in an encompassing shell.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Iwan Baan

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center establishes a new 32,800-square-foot campus nexus for Parsons The New School for Design by uniting and comprehensively re-organizing the street-level spaces of the school’s four discrete buildings around a new campus quad. The center performs as an expansive urban threshold that draws together the school’s creative programs and its vibrant Greenwich Village context.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Michael Moran

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: The Corporate Headquarters for Tishman Speyer Properties is located in historic Rockefeller Center. The project relocated Tishman’s corporate office and consolidated business units in this flagship space, which is one of the firm’s signature properties. Modifications to the 1931 building created dramatic spaces that highlight the firm’s forward-thinking mission, mirrored most prominently by their Modern art collection.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Peter Aaron/Esto

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: Built, like its neighbors, over a century ago, and part of a continuous network of buildings in a historical district, this town house has been completely renovated. Floor openings with bridges, skylights, and a three story galvanized steel wall animate the spaces and integrate the floors vertically. Exposed brick walls, painted white, are juxtaposed to blue epoxy floors. Glass and steel elements compose the spaces and unify a diverse but consistent palette of materials, resulting in a Modern spatial quality within a traditional town house typology.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Paul Warchol

AIA 2009 Honor Awards for Interior Architecture
AIA commentary: The World Headquarters for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) established a precedent for a new work environment that is also a model for sustainable, low-impact development for the surrounding region. The building is contemporary to reflect the organization’s global advocacy, and transparent and open to reflect the organization’s honesty and communication, yet it is inspired by the local vernacular.
Photo courtesy AIA/© Peter Vanderwarker