AIA Design Awards - Philadelphia Question

Hey, Jonathan. Timely question. As you probably know, the original idea behind Top Ten was a stop-gap to give the Institute Honor Awards time to catch up. Finally around 2013 or 2014, the general design awards began asking for performance metrics, but I’m told by AIA National that not everyone submits the information, which isn’t disqualifying, and the jury is under not obligation to consider this information. The published results are hit-or-miss about sustainability. One reason we reframed the Top Ten criteria a couple of years ago was to raise the bar. I joined the AIA San Diego board this year, and we just began revamping the design awards program over the last month. There was a COTE Award that was fairly vague (like many of the chapter COTE Awards, since the chapters generally aren’t aligned or coordinated with the national COTE criteria, a challenge COTE national has wrestled with for years…). In San Diego, we decided to eliminate the COTE Award and adopt the national Honor Awards criteria (below) in the general design awards but ensure that the jury takes this into account. The aim is to signal that sustainability is an inherent aspect of design excellence. To celebrate the two in separate awards risks perpetuating the idea that the two topics remain separate. Let me know if the screen shots below go through. Lance Hosey, FAIA, LEED Fellow 2017 AIA Institute Honor Awards Entry Form From: J

I see that the screen shots didn’t go through. Is there a way to post a document on here? F

Okay, trying to post from the site. Sorry for all the emails. See if this goes through. It's the 2017 Institute Honor Awards entry form, which includes fields for a "sustainability story," energy, water, materials, etc. 

Jonathan, San Francisco used to have a COTE award, plus standard honor awards. We got rid of the COTE award maybe 8 years ago, and included sustainability as part of the regular honor awards. Others in SF may be able to chime in on the exact timing and process. I will take the opposite perspective from Lance. Although I’ve been generally with the general honor awards’ inclusion (albeit very lightly) of sustainability, I’ve been very disappointed with SF’s move away from a stand-alone COTE award. I think there’s absolutely a need to understand and recognize top performing (and beautiful) projects that may not quite make the cut for the honor awards. While I totally agree that we don’t want to perpetuate the separateness of these issues, I see a missed opportunity to really focus and educate on the COTE measures. Conventional honor awards are sort of like “big design, little sustainability”, while the reverse is true for COTE. I may be jaded, but the two issues will not be on a fully even playing field in the mainstream of our profession, even in SF, for a long time. Here are the awards from 2017: http://www.aiasf.org/page/Design_Awards_2017. Only a handful reference performance (lightly) in the descriptions. Mara MARA BAUM AIA, LEED Fellow, WELL AP, WELL Faculty Vice President | Sustainable Design Leader, Health and Wellness HOK 1 Bush St., Suite 200 | San Francisco, CA 94104 USA t +1 415 356 8660 m +1 415 691 9782 mara.baum@hok.com hok.com | connect From: Lance Hos

AIA East Bay and AIA SF have been requiring a performance metrics form (2 page excel file) for design awards.  Since the design jury may not be able to digest the level of detail that goes into these performance forms, a separate sub-group of sustainability 'jurors' evaluate these forms and the sustainability attributes of each project (these people are typically designers that are familiar with the subject matter, EUIs, and applying a critical eye to self-reported metrics/material). This sub-jury generates an overall score for projects with respect to their performance, and the scores are then provided to the design jury with the intent/expectation that they will weigh sustainability criteria into their decisions.  I hear that the AIA California Council is working on embedding this model in the awards at the state level as well (sustainability attributes + expert review).  I'm not enamored with organization of the form content and some parts are confusing, but it's great for the jury to have a filter and at least bring up performance/sustainability in their assessment.  I can share an example of this document and/or put you in touch with folks at the components who are involved with this process if you'd be interested - gfuertes@lmsarch.com

Speaking for myself (and not for COTE, especially since I rolled of the AG in January), I would agree with Mara that there’s a need to raise the bar, dive deeper, whatever metaphor you like, and a general design award usually doesn’t do that, beyond some simple metrics. However, the problem with calling such an award a “COTE Award” is that there are many different chapters using different metrics. Why label it “COTE” unless it uses the same measures and metrics that Top Ten does? In my opinion, there’s a fairly disconcerting misalignment across the COTE universe. One chapter decides that certain metrics are important, while another chapter decides other metrics are more important, which confuses, rather than clarifying, the very important question about what COTE stands for. We may not be able to harmonize the “sustainability” world, but shouldn’t all COTE entities at least be able to agree on what topics are important to evaluate and how to evaluate them? Otherwise, if a local chapter wants to continue an award category that evaluate performance separately from the general design awards, don’t call it a “COTE Award.” FYI, the San Diego chapter has a separate award sponsored by San Diego Gas and Electric that evaluates energy performance only. Often the projects that win this award also have won the COTE Award, which seems redundant. From: Mara Baum

I agree with that – having some type of AIA sustainability award is important, but it shouldn’t be called COTE if it doesn’t use the COTE metrics. MARA BAUM HOK mara.baum@hok.com t +1 415 356 8660 m+1 415 691 9782 From:

Random...but we did an analysis to see if the Honor Awards at the National level 'cared' about sustainability. What we found was that in the past 10 years almost 70% of the Honor Award winners had sustainability discussed as part of their submission data. it was very encouraging to see that even in an AIA award that is not sustainability or performance focused (such as COTE) that the winners had made that connection. Which to me meant that sustainable design and high-performance buildings win awards on their own merit. (I think) I have attached the data and graphics we created if you are interested in taking a look.

Amber, This is great!  Thank you for sharing.  Jacob

Hey, Amber. This is fascinating. Where (what organization) did you do this? Where did all this info come from? It’s not in the AIA showcases of the award winners, and in fact many (most?) Honor Award showcases on the AIA site mention nothing at all about performance. For example, the Logan Center (2017 winner, Williams/Tsien) has zero information about sustainability or performance, but your chart suggests it meets many high-performance criteria, information that must have come from other sources, presumably. For instance, your chart considers issues that go beyond the metrics requested by AIA. Since many of these projects didn’t pursue LEED, where did you get the information, and how was it assessed? (E.g., Site Ecology listed as “YES.”) If these charts are accurate, they raise a couple of key questions about AIA: * If many/most of these projects are high performers, as your research suggests, why is the AIA not celebrating that in its publication of these projects? * Is performance perceived to be incidental to design excellence—or more specifically winning an Honor Award? Although the entry forms has for basic performance metrics, AIA staff tells me that not providing this information isn’t disqualifying, and the jury is under no obligation to make it a deciding factor. It’s also not clear whether jury selection focuses on people who are qualified to understand the relationships between these metrics and the visible aspects of design, which arguably is among the most important factors in making these awards programs work well. In short: Your research seems to show that Honor Award winners generally have a respectable level of performance, but the question remains whether this information is a factor in choosing these projects for Honor Awards, especially since much of this information isn’t available to the jury, and they’re not obligated to consider it anyway. Presumably most folks these days would say that sustainability is an inherent part of design excellence, but unless we make their links more explicit, we risk continuing the perception that these are different topics that are, at best, both important but disconnected—separate but equal. My impression is that many still see standards of “good design” and “green design” as a tug-of-war: what it looks like and how it works are different questions that lead to compromises undermining performance. Lance Hosey, FAIA, LEED Fellow From: Amber Richane

      We did the research in-house at CRTKL and used a fairly low-bar. If there was a mention of a sustainability strategy used on a project we counted it. We wanted to see if they winners were winning with no mention of sustainability or if they were winning and including something about sustainability. Happy to discuss in more detail if u like! Give a call 310-439-0071