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A Greensburg, Kan., school, a small commercial building in Waldo and the Kansas City Convention Center's Grand Ballroom have been named standout design projects of the year by the local American Institute of Architects chapter.
Honor awards, chosen unanimously by a panel of outside architects, went Friday night to these three projects, all predominantly modern in style:
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Botwin Family Partners' commercial building
in Waldo includes a drawing by artist Anne Lindberg in the
second-story glazing, which helps reduce heat. |
•A new K-12 campus, designed by BNIM,
in the tornado-flattened and now-rebuilding town of Greensburg.
•A two-level, glass-walled modernist building, with a planted roof, at 75th and
Washington streets, designed by El Dorado Inc. The building, dubbed "Replanted,"
replaced the old Waldo Theater, which was destroyed by fire in 2007.
•The $70 million city ballroom, by HNTB Architecture. Judges saw
the Convention Center addition as a well-executed civic space,
an accomplishment rarely achieved in such projects. They especially
liked how its simple, modern design reflected the classical lineage
of architecture.
The jury included Marlon Blackwell, an architect and teacher in
Fayetteville, Ark.; Charles Linn, a Topeka native and longtime
writer for Architectural Record; and Kirsten Ring Murray, a Seattle
architect. They considered 81 entries.
The work of BNIM dominated the jury's attention. Of 12 awards given
out in three tiers of recognition, BNIM won four and shared in
a fifth. Another big winner, El Dorado, won awards in each category.
The middle-tier merit awards went to El Dorado for its Unitarian
Fellowship chapel, outside Lawrence; to Gould Evans for its South
Junior High School, also in Lawrence; to a team of BNIM and 360
Architecture for J.E. Dunn's new headquarters in downtown Kansas
City; and to BNIM for the City Union Mission's Christian Life Center,
the Blue Valley School District's Support Services Center and the
Omega Center for Sustainable Living in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
The Omega Center, a wastewater treatment facility that has gotten
nationwide attention for advancing the principles of sustainable
building, prompted the most heated debate in the judging. Although
admired for addressing the stringent requirements of a "living
building" — producing all its own energy, for example — BNIM’s
design left judges divided over its qualities as architecture.
This was architecture's greatest challenge, the jury members agreed,
to find a satisfying balance between the purely functional and
inspired design.
Third-tier citation awards were given to Helix for its renovation
of the AIA chapter's new headquarters, 1801 McGee St.; to Gould
Evans for the design of an unbuilt high school expansion in Manhattan,
Kan.; and to El Dorado for the Finn Lofts, a warehouse conversion
in Wichita.
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