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
University Buildings | Jun 26, 2023
Addition by subtraction: The value of open space on higher education campuses
Creating a meaningful academic and student life experience on university and college campuses does not always mean adding a new building. A new or resurrected campus quad, recreational fields, gardens, and other greenspaces can tie a campus together, writes Sean Rosebrugh, AIA, LEED AP, HMC Architects' Higher Education Practice Leader.
Standards | Jun 26, 2023
New Wi-Fi standard boosts indoor navigation, tracking accuracy in buildings
The recently released Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11az enables more refined and accurate indoor location capabilities. As technology manufacturers incorporate the new standard in various devices, it will enable buildings, including malls, arenas, and stadiums, to provide new wayfinding and tracking features.
Green | Jun 26, 2023
Federal government will spend $30 million on novel green building technologies
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $30 million from the Inflation Reduction Act to increase the sustainability of federal buildings by testing novel technologies. The vehicle for that effort, the Green Proving Ground (GPG) program, will invest in American-made technologies to help increase federal electric vehicle supply equipment, protect air quality, reduce climate pollution, and enhance building performance.
Office Buildings | Jun 26, 2023
Electric vehicle chargers are top priority for corporate office renters
Businesses that rent office space view electric vehicle (EV) charging stations as a top priority. More than 40% of companies in the Americas and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) are looking to include EV charging stations in future leases, according to JLL’s 2023 Responsible Real Estate study.
Laboratories | Jun 23, 2023
A New Jersey development represents the state’s largest-ever investment in life sciences and medical education
In New Brunswick, N.J., a life sciences development that’s now underway aims to bring together academics and researchers to work, learn, and experiment under one roof. HELIX Health + Life Science Exchange is an innovation district under development on a four-acre downtown site. At $731 million, HELIX, which will be built in three phases, represents New Jersey’s largest-ever investment in life sciences and medical education, according to a press statement.
Sports and Recreational Facilities | Jun 22, 2023
NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars release conceptual designs for ‘stadium of the future’
Designed by HOK, the Stadium of the Future intends to meet the evolving needs of all stadium stakeholders—which include the Jaguars, the annual Florida-Georgia college football game, the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl, international sporting events, music festivals and tours, and the thousands of fans and guests who attend each event.
Architects | Jun 22, 2023
Keith Hempel named President of LPA Design Studios
LPA Design Studios today announced the promotion of Chief Design Officer Keith Hempel, FAIA, to president of the 58-year-old integrated design firm. Hempel, who joined LPA in 1995, has been an integral part of the firm’s growth, helping to develop an integrated design process that has produced industry-leading results.
Industrial Facilities | Jun 20, 2023
A new study presses for measuring embodied carbon in industrial buildings
The embodied carbon (EC) intensity in core and shell industrial buildings in the U.S. averages 23.0 kilograms per sf, according to a recent analysis of 26 whole building life-cycle assessments. That means a 300,000-sf warehouse would emit 6,890 megatons of carbon over its lifespan, or the equivalent of the carbon emitted by 1,530 gas-powered cars driven for one year. Those sobering estimates come from a new benchmark study, “Embodied Carbon U.S. Industrial Real Estate.”
Virtual Reality | Jun 16, 2023
Can a VR-enabled AEC Firm transform building projects?
With the aid of virtual reality and 3D visualization technologies, designers, consultants, and their clients can envision a place as though the project were in a later stage.
Mechanical Systems | Jun 16, 2023
Cogeneration: An efficient, reliable, sustainable alternative to traditional power generation
Cogeneration is more efficient than traditional power generation, reduces carbon emissions, has high returns on the initial investment, improves reliability, and offers a platform for additional renewable resources and energy storage for a facility. But what is cogeneration? And is it suitable for all facilities?