AIA awards groundbreaking construction work

by Carly Midgley | October 21, 2016 12:08 pm

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Technology in Architectural Practice[1]/Construction Contract Administration[2] (TAP/CCA) Innovation Award honors projects that enhance efficiency, building life cycle performance, cost-effectiveness, and team communication. This year, a winner and/or honorable mention were selected for four of the award’s five categories.

Stellar design
This year’s winner for the stellar design category was Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture’s Astana Expo City 2017[3] in Astana, Kazakhstan. This project sought to exemplify the exposition’s theme of ‘Future Energy,’ employing a number of methods to decrease the site’s energy demand. For instance, an emergency store of energy equaling two days’ demand is maintained onsite, and 90 percent of onsite waste will be routed away from landfills. The site also features high-performance glazing and temperature-modulating energy piles.

Cunningham Group Architecture’s Epic Deep Space Auditorium[4] (Verona, Wisconsin) earned this category’s honorable mention. Successful modeling was the primary contributor to this project’s success—complex shape generation programs were used to develop hand-sculpted and laser-cut models for the roof forms and building façade, while the final large-scale physical model was 3D scanned so it could be integrated with building information modeling (BIM) software. The final product, which was completed in less than 24 months, seats up to 11,400 visitors and is Epic Systems[5] Corporation’s largest auditorium.

Project delivery and construction administration excellence
Mortensen and CannonDesign’s work on Froedtert and the Medical College of Wisconsin Center for Advanced Care[6] won the project delivery and construction administration excellence category. Ultimately reducing requests for information (RFIs) by 50 percent and architect supplemental instruction (ASI) by 18 percent, the team’s one-model approach facilitated team coordination and communication throughout the project. This also accelerated the modeling process—so much so the owner’s request for five additional floors could be fulfilled with no change to the project completion date.

Practice-based or academic research, curriculum, or applied technology development
This category received an honorable mention—Payette’s glazing and winter comfort tool[7]. This Boston team sought to further the industry’s limited understanding of how façade properties affect occupant comfort. The straightforward method the team devised allows industry professionals to design glazed façades that provide maximum comfort, energy performance, and savings. It is a solid alternative to the only pre-existing option—a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation that was both expensive and inefficient.

Exemplary use in a small firm
The exemplary use in a small firm category was awarded to Studio Talo Architecture for its work with Youth and Opportunity United[8] (YOU) in Evanston, Illinois. Studio Talo showed respect for YOU’s mission of serving youth—its response to owners’ requests for renderings of a new headquarters featured virtual ‘tours’ led by young people who had actually been served by the organization. Video avatars of these youths led viewers through a 360-degree, virtual reality rendering of the new facility, explaining how YOU affects their lives and community along the way.

Although the judging of the award itself has been completed, members of the public can now vote[9] for their favorite AIA TAP/CCA Innovation Award project until November 18.

Source URL: https://www.constructionspecifier.com/aia-awards-groundbreaking-construction-work/

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