Architectural Record

"Firm Wins Top Prize for Design"

National architecture award honors rest stop

Like "Best of" albums of contemporary music, the AIA Honor Awards program aims to bring together outstanding works from a given stretch of time. And like those "best" melodies, some of the award-winning projects are well known while others are more obscure. In this year's group, for example, Steven Holl's Kiasma art museum in Helsinki has already basked in the international limelight, while Richter Architects' Rest Area in Brooks County, Texas, is less high profile. Like music, some of the award-winning projects will become classics with age, while others grow dated. It's often hard to predict how architecture (or music) will harmonize with changing times.

To gain insight into the jury selections, we sent our contributing editor, distinguished critic Andrea O. Dean, behind the scenes to interview the jurors and find out what recurrent themes or trends they detected in the 1999 entries - to fathom what most surprised, impressed, and disappointed. Our intrepid reporter also drew her own conclusions as she looked closely at the work in all three award categories: Architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design. Ultimately, she considered how the submissions and winners resonate with the cultural overtones at this fin-de-millennium.