The Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has voted for Ehrlich Architects to receive the 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The firm will be honored at the 2015 AIA National Convention in Atlanta. Ehrlich Architects is renowned for fluidly melding classic California Modernist style with multicultural and vernacular design elements by including marginalized design languages and traditions.
The AIA Architecture Firm Award, given annually, is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years.
The work of Ehrlich Architects covers a wide variety of program types (residential, commercial, institutional, educational) and uses a much richer palette of materials and textures than the typical California Modernist-influenced firm. However, they are most distinguished by the subtle and complex way they blend Modernist and multicultural design elements.
Before founding his Los Angeles-based firm in 1979, Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, spent time working with the Peace Corps in Africa. There Ehrlich gained an appreciation for simple, natural materials and vernacular solutions to energy, sustainability, and building performance challenges. Back in Southern California, Ehrlich found opportunities to renovate properties designed by architects high up in the California Modernist canon (like Richard Neutra, FAIA), which helped him to develop a confident, loose-limbed, but still traditional Modernist aesthetic. But his experiences in Africa, with building traditions created years before Modernism demanded a total rupture with the past, pushed him to develop an architecture that was more inclusive, responsible, and responsive than pure Modernism.
Ehrlich Architects is led by four diverse partners whose personal backgrounds and experiences result in a unique cultural sensitivity and a commitment to creating architecture that is globally relevant. They are: Steven Ehrlich, FAIA; Takashi Yanai, AIA; Patricia Rhee, AIA; and Mathew Chaney, AIA.
To fulfill these goals, Ehrlich Architects see themselves as “architectural anthropologists”—exploring ancient, developing-world building traditions and situating them in contemporary buildings to solve contemporary problems. Japanese-style courtyards, Middle Eastern lattice screens, and vernacular mud construction have all been ways they enrich contemporary architecture with age-old multicultural building elements.
“The marriage of the particular with the universal is one of the great virtues of the firm’s design approach, where connections between culture, climate, people and place are woven together in a distinct humanistic architecture shaped by circumstance,” wrote Steve Dumez, FAIA in a letter of recommendation.
A few of their most notable projects include:
- The Ahmadu Bello University Theater in Zaria, Nigeria. One of Ehrlich’s most vernacular and sustainable buildings, this 500-seat venue is composed of a ring of mud-walled pavilions, decorated with traditional bas-relief ornamentation. Local craftsmen helped with its construction, and it can be arranged in both proscenium and theater-in-the-round configurations.
- The Federal National Council Parliament Building Complex in Abu Dhabi, UAE. A symbol for a burgeoning democracy in the Middle East, it melds familiar Arabic design language with contemporary form and the latest technological advances to create meaning, maximum functionality and environmental sustainability.
- The 700 Palms Residence in Los Angeles, which uses Corten steel, copper, and stucco to create a strong, rugged approach to California Modernism, dissolving barriers between indoors and outdoors with glass, alternately boxy and brawny, light and open.
- Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Phoenix, Ariz. As the firm’s first design-build project, utilizing BIM, fast track, and integrated project delivery, the building delivered great value to the public in less than two years and was a harbinger of downtown Phoenix’s energetic redevelopment.
- The John Roll U.S. Courthouse in Yuma, Ariz., takes the symmetrical massing of a typical 19th-century courthouse and reinterprets it into a Modernist desert sandstone box, adding generous public space with a massive canopy-shaded “front porch” composed of photovoltaic panels.
Ehrlich Architects is the 52nd AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient. Previous recipients of the AIA Firm Award include, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple (2013), VJAA (2012), BNIM (2011), Pugh + Scarpa (2010), Kieran Timberlake (2008), Muphy/Jahn (2005), Polshek Partnership (1992), Venturi, Raunch, and Scott Brown (1985), I.M. Pei and Partners (1968), and SOM (1962).
Related Stories
Contractors | Nov 1, 2023
Nonresidential construction spending increases for the 16th straight month, in September 2023
National nonresidential construction spending increased 0.3% in September, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis of data published today by the U.S. Census Bureau. On a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, nonresidential spending totaled $1.1 trillion.
Sponsored | MFPRO+ Course | Oct 30, 2023
For the Multifamily Sector, Product Innovations Boost Design and Construction Success
This course covers emerging trends in exterior design and products/systems selection in the low- and mid-rise market-rate and luxury multifamily rental market. Topics include facade design, cladding material trends, fenestration trends/innovations, indoor/outdoor connection, and rooftop spaces.
Office Buildings | Oct 30, 2023
Find Your 30: Creating a unique sense of place in the workplace while emphasizing brand identity
Finding Your 30 gives each office a sense of autonomy, and it allows for bigger and broader concepts that emphasize distinctive cultural, historic or other similar attributes.
Giants 400 | Oct 30, 2023
Top 170 K-12 School Architecture Firms for 2023
PBK Architects, Huckabee, DLR Group, VLK Architects, and Stantec top BD+C's ranking of the nation's largest K-12 school building architecture and architecture/engineering (AE) firms for 2023, as reported in Building Design+Construction's 2023 Giants 400 Report.
Giants 400 | Oct 30, 2023
Top 100 K-12 School Construction Firms for 2023
CORE Construction, Gilbane, Balfour Beatty, Skanska USA, and Adolfson & Peterson top BD+C's ranking of the nation's largest K-12 school building contractors and construction management (CM) firms for 2023, as reported in Building Design+Construction's 2023 Giants 400 Report.
Giants 400 | Oct 30, 2023
Top 80 K-12 School Engineering Firms for 2023
AECOM, CMTA, Jacobs, WSP, and IMEG head BD+C's ranking of the nation's largest K-12 school building engineering and engineering/architecture (EA) firms for 2023, as reported in Building Design+Construction's 2023 Giants 400 Report.
MFPRO+ Special Reports | Oct 27, 2023
Download the 2023 Multifamily Annual Report
Welcome to Building Design+Construction and Multifamily Pro+’s first Multifamily Annual Report. This 76-page special report is our first-ever “state of the state” update on the $110 billion multifamily housing construction sector.
Giants 400 | Oct 23, 2023
Top 190 Multifamily Architecture Firms for 2023
Humphreys and Partners, Gensler, Solomon Cordwell Buenz, Niles Bolton Associates, and AO top the ranking of the nation's largest multifamily housing sector architecture and architecture/engineering (AE) firms for 2023, as reported in Building Design+Construction's 2023 Giants 400 Report. Note: This ranking factors revenue for all multifamily buildings work, including apartments, condominiums, student housing facilities, and senior living facilities.
Affordable Housing | Oct 20, 2023
Cracking the code of affordable housing
Perkins Eastman's affordable housing projects show how designers can help to advance the conversation of affordable housing.
Senior Living Design | Oct 19, 2023
Senior living construction poised for steady recovery
Senior housing demand, as measured by the change in occupied units, continued to outpace new supply in the third quarter, according to NIC MAP Vision. It was the ninth consecutive quarter of growth with a net absorption gain. On the supply side, construction starts continued to be limited compared with pre-pandemic levels.