2025 Design Awards
With Jury Notes
Snow Country Prison Memorial
Category: Cultural, Built | Award Level: Honor
The Snow Country Prison Memorial takes its name from the colloquial term used by Japanese Americans imprisoned at the Fort Lincoln Internment Camp during World War II. Located in the courtyard of the Administration Building at United Tribes Technical College—formerly Fort Lincoln, established in 1895 as a frontier outpost enforcing federal authority to confine Native nations—the project explores the intersecting histories of injustice experienced by both Native and Japanese Americans.
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The presentation was supported by compelling diagrams and photographs that made a strong case for the memorial’s significance. Though modest in scale, the project is profoundly powerful. The concept of Kintsugi, drawn from Japanese ceramics, feels poetic and deeply appropriate, symbolizing repair, resilience, and continuity. The memorial communicates its spirit clearly, serving as an exercise in effective placemaking while linking to adjacent exhibition spaces and integrating with the broader campus circulation plan.
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The design creates opportunities for education, remembrance, active community participation, celebration, and healing. The Kintsugi band functions as a call to action, inviting offerings and making the experience personal. Material choices—such as the reuse of slate and railroad ties—contribute to the crafted quality of the installation. Its almost “crude” expression feels authentic to the site and context; a polished or overly refined approach would have seemed contrived in this landscape. Instead, the memorial’s raw honesty resonates, embodying both history and hope.
Santa Fe 2050
Category: Master Planning, Unbuilt | Award Level: Honor
Santa Fe 2050 is presented as a film that captures one individual’s vision for the future of land planning, urban design, preservation, housing, and sustainability in Santa Fe. While the production itself is somewhat raw, the story it tells is compelling and ambitious.
The proposal imagines three distinct villages, each offering a unique lens on how technology and tradition might be integrated to shape the city’s future.
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The Food Hall Farmers Market Village, located in the Santa Fe Railyard, envisions AI-integrated terminals within a vibrant food market supported by local growers. Composting, recycling, and even snow clearing are imagined as robotic functions, while a co-housing prototype demonstrates how added density can be achieved without sacrificing character.
The Brainstem Village, situated in midtown, is conceived as a tech campus and living lab for reimagining public service through AI. Here, “amigo” robots assist children, the elderly, and the infirm, while a mutual aid garage, maker space, and mentoring programs foster collaboration across generations. Medium-density housing proposals, including a plaza and community spaces for markets and performances, respect the history of the place while interpreting it at scale. A network of autonomous vehicles connects the villages.
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The Sunnyside Village, proposed for the former Santa Fe Country Club site, addresses the pressing issue of water in the West. AI-managed water systems underpin a community designed around shared kitchens, gardens, and healthcare facilities, blending demographics in a supportive environment. The imagery associated with this vision is particularly compelling: developments that respect local traditions while providing backdrops for gardens, pathways, and public spaces. Renderings range from four- to five-story buildings to lower-density two-story structures, each intriguing in its own way.
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Ultimately, Santa Fe 2050 offers a utopian vision that sparks conversation. It appears to build upon the foundations of the ReVision project, extending its spirit of community engagement into a speculative future. By integrating technology with tradition, the project makes AI feel approachable, supportive, and useful rather than intimidating. The renderings respect place and culture while imagining new forms of community, making this an important and thought-provoking contribution to the dialogue about Santa Fe’s future.
ReVision Santa Fe
Category: Community Impact, Unbuilt | Award Level: Honor
ReVision is an ambitious series of five events, spanning 14 months, that explored the past, present, and future of the Santa Fe Style. The program included presentations, walking and bike tours, design charrettes, discussions, and a gallery exhibition. To undertake such an effort says a great deal about the community: this was important, aspirational work requiring remarkable discipline and commitment to self-examination.
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Engaging non-designers in conversations about architectural identity is notoriously difficult, yet this group succeeded in drawing broad participation. Santa Fe’s rich history, passionate community, and compelling story provided fertile ground for this success. The submission itself was strong, with excellent graphics and narrative, and the gallery exhibitions appeared elegant and sophisticated in their execution.
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This project sets a high standard for community engagement, offering a model for any community grappling with growth and identity issues. It exemplifies the “Citizen Architect” ideal illuminated by the AIA—architects and planners leading the conversation, working alongside city officials and community members to illuminate challenges, gather feedback, and foster debate. Through this process, they offered not only solutions but also a path forward for future dialogue. ReVision demonstrates how design leadership can catalyze meaningful civic action.
Standing Rock Cultural Center
Category: Cultural, Unbuilt | Award Level: Merit
The Standing Rock Cultural Center is envisioned as a place of healing, learning, and cultural continuity for the Standing Rock Reservation. The submission conveys a complex program with heavy messaging, yet succeeds through clear diagramming and powerful storytelling.
At its heart, the project celebrates community, honoring the partnership of three separate tribes and weaving their narratives into a shared vision. Conceptually, the scheme embraces the elemental connections between sky, earth, spirit, and land, grounding the design in cultural resonance.
The site plan, conceived as a campus of buildings, is both ambitious and compelling. It embraces the character of the landscape to define zoning, incorporating features such as a game field, dinosaur building, extensive trail system, and gardens. The entry sequence—marked by a descent into the earth and a gradual reveal of the “place”—is particularly memorable, offering a ceremonial progression into the center.
Renderings communicate warmth through the expression of an engineered wood structural system, while the main hall rendering highlights a profound connection to place. Subtle details, including the integration of cultural patterns into the composition, enrich the design and underscore its authenticity. This is a project that feels deeply rooted in its context; it could not exist anywhere else.
Caddo Nation Child Care Center
Category: Cultural, Built | Award Level: Citation
The Caddo Nation Child Care Center is a holistic facility designed to support the tribe’s children and their families, fulfilling a critical need within the community. The program is impressively complex, incorporating indoor and outdoor teaching spaces, offices, teacher areas, community rooms, an aquatic center, and even a tornado shelter—all wrapped into a compact and efficient package. The presentation was particularly strong, with clear diagrams, compelling images, and quotes that reinforced the design intent.
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Organizationally, the parti is clean and effective: three building volumes form bars around a central courtyard, which itself connects back to the larger landscape. Interior spaces are thoughtfully imbued with natural light, and the scale and placement of child-height windows are both clever and humane. Passive strategies are well integrated, enhancing comfort and sustainability. The courtyard is a highlight, offering a protected outdoor space where teaching and classroom activities can occur, while also establishing a relationship with the surrounding water and wetlands. This connection to what lies beyond the site brings a natural element into the daily experience.
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The exterior materiality is equally inventive. The design evokes the protective qualities of an armadillo, drawing inspiration from the Caddo grass house wrapping strategy. A white metallic shell shields the building from the elements, while wood shingles soften the elevations and enrich the user experience. Together, these strategies create a facility that is both resilient and welcoming, deeply rooted in cultural identity and community purpose.
2025 Jury
Eric Logan FAIA Jury Chair
CLB Architects
Jackson WY
Bozeman MT
Jim Capuccino
Hutker Architects
Falmouth MA
Phil Weddle
Weddle Gilmore Architects
Scottsdale AZ
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