by Mark Roddy, FAIA
AIA Central Valley Board Director
Last Sunday evening, my wife and I watched the Oscars. We love cinema almost as much as we love architecture, and we look forward to this celebration of film every year. It’s always exciting to see who will win each category, as well as what they will say. The Academy Awards event is notorious for providing winners a platform to speak out against injustice, inequality, environmental issues and to promote their personal causes. Every year these films and award winners make a memorable impact on our pop culture and become sound bites in the news for weeks.
This year’s event made me reflect about the AIA Central Valley Design Awards and what the winning projects and architects might communicate. Certainly, the awards program celebrates design excellence and is a worthy and wonderful accolade honoring team members. But what if we had a national audience on primetime television? When we accepted the award, what would we say? What would be the values and ideas that we would strive to communicate about the responsibility of our profession to the greater public? Would it be about the divine inspiration during our initial walk of the project site? Or the first sketch we created while talking with our client? I surely hope not. As architects, we generate ideas, but more importantly we manifest them into our built world and that is an awesome responsibility. If we have people’s attention, we should say something important. We have to have a call to action and that action is the AIA Framework for Design Excellence.
A year and half ago, the American Institute of Architects’ Board of Directors ratified the member-passed resolution to focus as an Institute on climate action and subsequently adopted the COTE Top Ten Measures as the AIA Framework for Design Excellence. This pragmatic Framework represents the defining principles of a design vision in the 21st century. These 10 principles seek to inform progress toward a zero-carbon, equitable, resilient and healthy built environment. The Framework is intended to be accessible and relevant for every architect, every client, and every project, regardless of size, typology, or aspiration. The Framework for Design Excellence challenges architects with a vision of what the profession strives to achieve. The 10 principles of the Framework are as follows:
- Design for Integration
- Design for Community
- Design for Ecosystems
- Design for Water
- Design for Economy
- Design for Energy
- Design for Well-being
- Design for Resources
- Design for Change
- Design for Discovery
For more details about the AIA Framework for Design Excellence: https://www.aia.org/resources/6077668-framework-for-design-excellence
As a new AIA Central Valley Board Member this year, I eagerly agreed to chair this year’s AIA Central Valley Design Awards. In the past two months we have had very productive committee meetings planning and organizing the program. One change you will see this year is inclusion of the Framework for Design Excellence within the written submission. Our goal is to address the Framework in a meaningful way, without making the process too onerous for our participating firms
I encourage each of you to submit your best work so that we can all continue to celebrate the creative and meaningful architecture within our community. And when you do submit, make sure you communicate to everyone what we value as a profession.