Unbuilt—Education
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Education: John Deutsch University Centre, Queen’s University
Designer: HDR + MJMA
Location: Kingston, Ontario, Canada
The John Deutsch University Centre is a historic student gathering place at the heart of Queen’s University. While its Collegiate Gothic form is an iconic part of the campus, the building’s entrances are inaccessible to people with disabilities. To open these spaces to all, a new addition acts as an armature: visitors are drawn up and into the building through a sequence of accessible, student-focused spaces. The addition’s design centers on sustainability and Indigenous culture, incorporating a finely detailed mass-timber auditorium that actively sequesters carbon while representing the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories on which the university is situated. The auditorium’s form is delineated with monumental stone fins, which act as a contemporary interpretation of the Collegiate Gothic context and work to deflect western sun.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: The Lawrenceville School Tsai Dining and Athletics Center
Designer: Sasaki
Project Name: University of Pennsylvania Meeting and Guest House
Designer: Deborah Berke Partners
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: University of Hawaii Value-Added Agricultural Product Development Center
Designer: University of Arkansas Community Design Center with Urban Works Architecture
Project Name: Wonderland ES Kindergarten Classroom Building
Designer: John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects
Unbuilt—Green Building
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Green Building: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Hoover Street Power Yard
Designer: HDR
Location: Los Angeles
The 93,500-square-foot Hoover Yard building will replace a dilapidated yard on a brownfield site with a structure housing a management and crew workplace, community/training room, break room, gym, materials warehouse, plus fleet maintenance and parking. The yard is an essential-services facility designed to survive the Big One and immediately get to work restoring power. The design is on target to achieve net-zero energy for an all-electric industrial facility with high plug loads. Water conservation strategies include low-flow fixtures, gray-water treatment, and remediation of underground pollution. Community benefits include street trees and thoughtful massing/screening to protect residential neighbors and respect the historic electrical distribution station.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: Orange County Sanitation District Headquarters Complex
Designer: HDR
Project Name: Suburban Transformations: The Community Solar Farm Market
Designer: John Amatruda
Unbuilt—Residential
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Residential: Urban Awning
Designer: Gensler
Location: Los Angeles
Urban Awning is a new model of affordable and supportive housing. It employs two stories of micro-units built of prefabricated metal stud panels underneath a large roof that is also panelized. The prototype can be built groundup or as a retrofit of an existing warehouse or big-box store. Urban Awning is rapidly deployable to serve the homeless and, when the housing crisis stabilizes, a variety of other populations. To achieve a truly dramatic reduction in per-unit costs, Urban Awning offers a less-is-more approach to raising the quality of urban life. This is accomplished by reallocating space, program, and material resources and employing minimal reliance upon expensive technology to manage light, energy, heat, and water.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: East Vancouver Integrated Health and Social Housing
Designer: HDR
Project Name: House Five
Designer: Studio Ames
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Hawaii Residence
Designer: Stayner Architects
Project Name: Plum Creek Valley Farmhouse
Designer: Clark Thenhaus/Endemic Architecture
Unbuilt—Interior
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Interior: Next Workspace
Designer: West of West
West of West has designed a new workplace envisioned as a cultural destination composed of resilient spaces dedicated to working together. It includes a flagship space for company events, meetings, and group collaboration, while individual work is done at home. These new modes of working confront the assumptions made within pre-pandemic office space and challenge the economic hyper-density of the open plan. This new world presents us with new questions: How do we design a more equitable and flexible workplace for the future? How can it be resilient when faced with unforeseen economic, environmental, and social change? How will that workplace support the culture of the people within it? The future demands flexible strategies that leverage new spatial and technological ideas to form, and support, different ways of working.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: Illume: Looking to the Future of Restaurant Design
Designer: Aria Group Architects
Project Name: Innovation Center
Designer: Leers Weinzapfel Associates
Unbuilt—Cultural
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Cultural: Lauritzen Gardens Horticulture Complex
Designer: HDR
Location: Omaha, Nebraska
As part of an expansion/master plan, Omaha’s Lauritzen Gardens engaged HDR’s design team to envision a new horticulture complex that would support the gardens’ mission of education, conservation, and horticultural excellence. Located almost half a mile from the entrance and visitors’ center, the more natural back-gardens currently are lacking in visitor accommodations, including access to refreshments, shade/shelter, and education opportunities. The project focuses strongly on offering a contextual solution to the native prairie landscape, with a dug-in form that identifies with its heritage of traditional sod houses. The design also utilizes multiple conservation strategies, including water collection and reuse, green roofs, and an earth tube system to moderate temperatures and reduce HVAC use.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: San Diego State University | Main Stage, Second Stage, and Amenities Pavilion | San Diego
Designer: HGA
Project Name: Silo City
Designer: STUDIO V Architecture
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Helsinki Hamam
Designer: Büro Koray Duman Architects in collaboration with Persak & Wurmfeld marine engineering and Niskanen & Salo
Unbuilt—Commercial
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Commercial: Houston Endowment Headquarters
Designer: Kevin Daly Architects in collaboration with PRODUCTORA
Location: Houston
In June 2019 the Houston Endowment, one of Texas’s largest philanthropic organizations, launched a competition soliciting designs for a new headquarters. It received over 120 initial team entries from 22 countries. In November the selection committee chose the team led by Kevin Daly Architects and Mexico City-based design collaborator PRODUCTORA as the winner, securing a commission set for completion in 2022. Located near downtown on a prominent 1.5-acre parcel in Spotts Park near the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, the new headquarters provides a fresh identity, permanent address, and environmentally sound workplace for the foundation. The building’s design and programming are deeply connected to the site and influenced by the organization’s mission of enriching the community by inspiring a stronger and healthier Houston.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: New England Mixed-Use Development
Designer: Trahan Architects
Project Name: Terminal Warehouse
Designer: COOKFOX Architects
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: 2150 Keith Drive
Designer: DIALOG
Project Name: Canadian Nuclear Laboratories Business Innovations Hub
Designer: HDR
Unbuilt—Public
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Public: Mental Health Cloister
Designer: Studio Ames
Location: New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven Mental Health Cloister is a mass-timber structure that builds on the typology of a monastic cloister and proposes a new model for an urban psychiatric care facility. A ring of mental health professionals’ offices surrounds an open space, creating a partial refuge from the city in the central space. The offices open onto both the street and the courtyard, acknowledging that mental healthcare serves to negotiate between the expectations of society and the realities of psychic life. This mediating courtyard space between the privacy of the consulting room and the varied pressures of our shared social commons offers the possibility of community integration and engagement in a holding environment.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: Frisco Public Library
Designer: Gensler
Project Name: Make the Road New York Community Center
Designer: TEN Arquitectos with Andrea Steele Architecture
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Nunavik’s Multifunctional Warehouse for Housing
Designer: Blouin Orzes architectes
Project Name: Mystic River Boathouse
Designer: Anmahian Winton Architects
Unbuilt—Landscape
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Landscape: Railyard Park
Architect and landscape architect: Ross Barney Architects
Associate architect: AFHJ Architects
Location: Rogers, Arkansas
Founded in 1881, Rogers, Arkansas, once lacked a traditional town square; the railroad was the center of economic activity. As the city grew, the railroad served as a boundary to development. When industry faded, irregular parcels of land along this corridor were left vacant. With a grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and through an inclusive public process that included input from more than one thousand residents, business owners, and municipal staff, the City of Rogers is transforming this undeveloped space into a new urban amenity in its downtown: Railyard. Featuring a plaza for pop-up events, interactive water feature, dynamic playground, and outdoor performance venue, the park aims to revive the heart of downtown Rogers.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: Downtown Cary Park
Landscape architect and master planner: OJB Landscape Architecture
Architect: Machado Silvetti
Project Name: Greenwood Community Park
Designer: Sasaki
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Red Fence Pastoral, Tri-Point Industrial Park and Food Processing Center
Designer: Cliff Garten Studio
Project Name: TMC 3 Innovation Park
Park landscape architect: Mikyoung Kim Design
Architect and master planner: Elkus Manfredi Architects
Unbuilt—Master Plan
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Master Plan: La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum Master Plan
Designer: WEISS/MANFREDI
Location: Los Angeles
The La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum are an enduring source of wonder. WEISS/MANFREDI’s reimagination of the park and museum emerges from a close analysis of what is present, inspiring a commitment to preserve and magnify the park and museum as an ever-changing site of discovery. The master plan connects the trio of identities that define the site—a community green, the lake pit, and the Page Museum—as one unified experience. Continuous loops connect the excavation sites, bring focus to the collection, create a new bridge across the lake pit, and link the Pleistocene past to the urban present of Los Angeles. Visitors will have an opportunity to peek into the museum exhibition pit and storage from various locations and within the museum’s new wing.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: L.A. River
Designer: Ballman Khapalova
Project Name: Buffalo Bayou Master Plan East
Designer: Buffalo Bayou Partnership and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Estuary Commons: Resilient by Design
Landscape architect: CMG Landscape Architecture
Architects: All Bay Collective, CMG Landscape Architects, AECOM, and David Baker Architects
Project Name: The Phoenix Co-op
Designer: Elizabeth Golden/Architecture
Unbuilt—Urban Design
2020 Best of Design Award for Unbuilt—Urban Design: The Great Bridge: Path to Equilibrium
Designer: DXA studio
Location: New York City
The Great Bridge envisions a future for the Brooklyn Bridge that elevates people over automobiles; reclaims land snarled by roads and ramps for civic use in the form of parks, museums, local commerce, recreation, and housing; and makes the bridge more accessible to adjacent communities. Upper deck expansion creates a planted promenade with lanes for tourists and commuters; the lower deck features six traffic lanes reduced to two for trolleys and emergency vehicles, with the remainder set aside for public use and dedicated bike lanes and planters. This will yield an experience that is more accessible, safe, democratic, and enjoyable. This concept will disentangle the infrastructural knots that currently encumber the bridge, restore the grandeur of its original design, and herald the return of the trolley.
Honorable Mentions
Project Name: Double Park: Reimagining NY’s Flatiron & NoMad District as a Network of Open Streets and Parks during the COVID period
Designer: OSD Outside and Project for Public Spaces
Project Name: The Washington Alley Project
Designer: EL Studio and UrbanSEED
Editors’ Picks:
Project Name: Greater Corktown Neighborhood Framework Plan
Designer: Perkins&Will
Project Name: Lake Street Corridor
Designer: Habitat Workshop
