The Six Recipients of 2024 AIA Minnesota Honor Awards and Commendations for Design Excellence

By Chris Hudson | November 21, 2024

*Mills Hall and the Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies at Bowdoin College in New Brunswick, Maine, designed by HGA. Photo by Michael Moran.*

FEATURE

AIA Minnesota recently announced the winners of its annual Honor Awards and Commendations for Design Excellence, the state’s most prestigious recognition for buildings designed by Minnesota architects. The 40 submissions were reviewed by a panel of three award-winning architects from around the country and evaluated using the AIA Framework for Design Excellence. The Framework outlines a holistic approach to quality design in 10 measures: Design for Integration, Equitable Communities, Ecology, Water, Economy, Energy, Well-being, Resources, Change, and Discovery.

Three projects received an Honor Award, for demonstrating excellence in two or more Framework measures, and three additional entries were awarded a Commendation for Design Excellence, for a notable achievement in a single Framework measure.

The 2024 jury included Ruth Baleiko, FAIA, of The Miller Hull Partnership in Seattle; Amy Slattery, AIA, NOMA, of Slattery in Kansas City; and Anthony Treu, AIA, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in New York. “We were so impressed with the quality throughout the submissions,” said Baleiko. “The 40 entries showed the Minnesota design community operating at a high level in their quest for excellence.”

Additional comments from the jury are included in the spotlights on the winning projects below.

Photos by Jasper Lazor.

Autism Discovery Center

St. Cloud, Minnesota
Client: St. Cloud State University
Architect: VJAA
Commendation for Excellence in Design for Well-Being

This new clinic educates and trains future healthcare professionals while providing professional services to individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD. The design team transformed cramped, natural-light-starved office space in a midcentury academic building into airy, calming environments through use of natural finishes, cool and neutral colors, and translucent glass in the interior hallway. The signature design solution is the replacement of the standard rectangular one-way mirror between clinic and observation rooms with a maple-lined circular niche with colorful, inviting seating. Integrating the mirror into the niche reduces the presence of the mirror for children in occupational therapy while still allowing staff and students to observe the sessions.

Jury comment: “What could have been something akin to a tenant improvement project became so much more with thoughtfulness and intentionality. Every element in these spaces responds to the needs of people who experience sensory differences. The circular nook—a beautiful element designed with a two-sided function—is an especially ingenious solution.”

Photos by Michael Robinson Photography.

CITYPARK Stadium

St. Louis, Missouri
Client: St. Louis CITY SC
Architects: Snow Kreilich Architects and HOK
Commendation for Excellence in Design for Equitable Communities

This 22,500-seat stadium for Major League Soccer’s St. Louis CITY SC was designed to anchor a new 25.5-acre sports district in Downtown West. Built on the site of a former highway off-ramp and parking lot, this project marks a new generation of North American stadiums that embrace openness over full enclosure. With a below-grade pitch and openings at all four corners, CITYPARK brings its rich urban surroundings into the match experience—and the energy of the game action and crowd out into the streets. Thoughtful planning for the district yielded landscaped plazas and promenades and art installations around the stadium. A variety of programming combines with neighboring training fields and facilities to activate the district year-round.

Jury comment: “There is so much to like about this stadium. The scale is just right with the way it nestles into its urban setting, and the openness at the corners and below the hovering canopy frames views of the surrounding neighborhood and St. Louis landmarks further away. With its integrated promenades and plazas, CITYPARK also feels like any everyday place. The owners and their architects have created something special in the heart of the city.”

Photos by Gaffer Photography.

825 Arts

St. Paul, Minnesota
Client: 825 Arts
Architect: VJAA
Honor Award for Excellence in Design for Equitable Communities, Economy, Resources, and Integration

This project saved and reanimated the long-vacant, historic Victoria Theater on University Avenue as an arts hub for the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods. On the street, the renovation restored the façade’s existing terra cotta detailing; inside, it immerses occupants in the layers of the theater’s past lives as a silent movie house and a speakeasy. Patched masonry is exposed, as are remnants of old murals and the ghosted outline of a long-removed staircase. New elements including a crisply detailed metal stair and mezzanine bridge and pops of bright yellow accentuate the building’s raw beauty. The reshaped interiors include accessible, multi-functional spaces for music and dance, theater and film, gallery display, teaching, and community gatherings.

Jury comment: “We love how the project embraced the story of the place and used as-found moments in the building to celebrate the layers of time. This building has been renewed because the community engaged with it—not because the project had a significant budget. The design demonstrates how economical interventions can yield incredible value. Even the simple, selective insertion of color like yellow brings new life to the layers of history.”

Photos by Gaffer Photography.

Lakewood Cemetery Welcome Center

Minneapolis, Minnesota
Client: Lakewood Cemetery
Architects: Snow Kreilich Architects and Miller Dunwiddie
Commendation for Excellence in Design for Energy

The 250-acre Lakewood Cemetery is a notable example of the 19th-century Garden Cemeteries, which inspired the first large urban parks in the U.S. Today, Lakewood is a leader in a movement to make cemeteries places not just for mourning but also for celebrating life and connecting to nature. The institution’s historical legacy and future come together in the all-electric, net-zero-energy Welcome Center, Lakewood’s new front door. A contemporary, stone-clad pavilion with a two-story colonnade, the building welcomes and orients visitors and hosts gatherings; it also houses Lakewood’s administrative offices. Net-zero energy use is achieved through an innovative geothermal energy exchange system, rooftop solar, and native and adaptive gardens, among other strategies.

Jury comment: “It can be very difficult to place a contemporary building in a setting like this—a place with so much history. Somehow this project has done so very comfortably. It’s a building that’s appropriate for its time with a notable energy and ecological story and inviting connections to the outdoors from its interior spaces. Perhaps most impressive, the project has reinvented how a building can serve a cemetery.”

Photos by Younes Bounhar, DoubleSpace Photography.

Lindsay Boathouse

Toronto, Ontario
Client: Upper Canada College
Architects: VJAA and RDHA
Honor Award for Excellence in Design for Well-Being and Discovery

This new project on Toronto’s Outer Harbor waterfront supports a more public-facing mission for a storied K-12 rowing program. Sited on a man-made peninsula and designed to capture dramatic views of the downtown skyline across the channel, the 9,400-square-foot facility houses boat storage bays, locker rooms, and a rowing training room that converts to community space for a variety of events. Environmental measures include a low-carbon, cross laminated timber structure assembled onsite, expansive bird-safe glazing for daylighting, passive ventilation, and green roofs for heat absorption and stormwater management. The boathouse and its launch area and crew docks are also part of Ports Toronto’s master plan to improve public access to an adjacent nature preserve.

Jury comment: “You look at the design drawings and the finished building, and you can see how the architects developed a clear idea and executed it in a few simple moves and with clean detailing. The boathouse’s three long forms, offset in plan, are unapologetically reminiscent of shells racing over the water. What makes this design remarkable is that its clarity of form and diagram are entirely in service to the program.”

Photos by Michael Moran.

Mills Hall and the Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies

New Brunswick, Maine
Client: Bowdoin College
Architect: HGA
Honor Award for Excellence in Design for Integration, Resources, and Energy

The first commercially scaled mass timber project in Maine, these two buildings were conceived in tandem to anchor the southeast corner of the historic Bowdoin College campus. Mills Hall, clad in red brick and copper, houses flexible classrooms, collaborative spaces, offices, a cinema, and an event space for the school and surrounding community. The Gibbons Center, a cross-disciplinary hub for bringing Arctic research to a broader audience, is the new home of the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum. Clad in black plank masonry, the Center for Arctic Studies was inspired by silhouette figures from the museum’s glass lantern slide collection. Together, the two buildings showcase the potential of innovative, carbon-reducing timber construction for the region.

Earlier this year, Mills Hall and the Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies won a national AIA Education Facility Design Award, a prestigious honor celebrating state-of-the-art learning environments.

Jury comment: “The asymmetrical forms work well with the use of traditional materials like brick, copper, and timber, and those materials are deployed with restraint to create dynamic spaces with very simple moves. Encountering these two buildings—even in photographs—is such an interesting experience. At first, you don’t think they are new, and then you look closer and deeper and realize how special they are.”