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Great Places Awards
The Great Places Awards are unique among programs that recognize professional and scholarly excellence in environmental design.
Now in its 14th year, they are distinguished by a close relationship among design, research and practice that engages human experiences. This process creates humane environments achieved by an interdisciplinary approach and concern for human factors in the design of the built environment.
Click here to view the 2012 Great Places Awards Call for Entries. The submission deadline is January 27, 2012!
We seek entries of exemplary work, inviting participation from a range of design and research disciplines, recognizing projects whose significance extends beyond any one profession or field. Projects should show how research and/or citizen participation is linked to or part of practice, demonstrating that an understanding of human interaction with place has generated the design.
We invite participation from the full breadth of environmental design and related research activities, including architecture, landscape architecture, planning, urban design, interior design, lighting design, graphic design, environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography and the physical sciences.
Each year we assemble a jury with diverse backgrounds in design, research and practice. The jury evaluates how each project, no matter what the discipline, addresses the human experience of well-designed places. Special attention is paid to the transferability of research about human experience of place into design and planning practice. The jury will select winners from four categories: place design, place planning, place research, and a book prize.
2012 Jury
Principal Landscape Architect, Richard Haag Associates, Inc.
Landscape Architect, educator, pioneer of adaptive reuse, naturalist, innovator, and scientist are terms expressed about Richard Haag in more than 600 built projects. Haag was educated at University of Illinois, University of California at Berkeley (B.L.A.), Harvard University Graduate School of Design (M.L.A.), awarded a Fulbright in Japan for two years and was Resident at the American Academy in Rome. Haag twice received the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Presidents Award for Design Excellence and is Founder and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington; the Richard Haag Endowed Scholarship was instituted in his honor. Haag is a national/international lecturer and juror. Haag received the 2003 ASLA Medal, a lifetime achievement award, the highest honor given to a Landscape Architect by his peers and the 2007 ASLA Design Medal. He received the First Waterfront Cultural Heritage Award in 2009 from The Waterfront Center/The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Executive Director, Pomegranate Center
Milenko is a thinker, teacher and an artist preparing communities for the future. In 1986, Milenko founded Pomegranate Center to explore how to use creativity in ways to improve society. He believes that working with communities is the most efficient, foundational way to improve society. He teaches that when it comes to community, together we always know more. He worked with hundreds of communities across the country and abroad, built over 40 gathering places, spoke at universities and community gatherings and conferences, and trained community leaders in the Pomegranate Center model of community building. He has been honored with many awards.
Lecturer, Landscape Architecture, University of Washington
As a registered landscape architect, Julie has professional experience developing award-winning and visionary large-scale public sites and urban planning projects as well as intimate neighborhood parks. As Design Director for the People’s Waterfront Coalition (PWC), she developed an award-winning proposal for re-envisioning Seattle’s downtown waterfront without the Alaskan Way Viaduct as a dynamic water’s edge with parks, beaches, recreation paths, event space and an urban street integrated into a functional shore ecology, and a transportation solution that supports a sustainable and livable future city. Julie was previously a principal with Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture where she served as project manager for the Olympic Sculpture Park, an award-winning urban park on Seattle downtown waterfront. She holds a MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia and was a Fellow with CHORA Institute of Architecture and Urbanism in London. Additionally, Julie currently sits on the Seattle Design Commission and Seattle’s Public Art Advisory Council.
Principal, Pyatok Architects, and Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
Michael Pyatok has been an architect and professor of architectural design for 43 years. Since opening his own office in 1984, he has designed over 35,000 units of affordable housing for lower-income households in the US and abroad, and developed participatory design methods to facilitate community involvement throughout the design process. He has helped many communities plan and implement new housing, neighborhood plans and community facilities. In 1995, he was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in recognition of his contribution to the profession. In 1996 he co-authored the book ‘Good Neighbors: Affordable Family Housing’. In 2001, Harvard appointed him its Buchsbaum Visiting Professor of Affordable Housing and Residential Architect featured him on its cover as the “Architect-of-the-Year” in recognition of the quality he has brought to affordable housing. In 2002, he was featured in Professional Builder Magazine as one of twelve “Thought Leaders” of the development industry and in 2007 he was named by Builder Magazine and the NAHB as one of the 50 most influential people in the U.S. housing industry. In 2011 he was inducted into the Design Hall of Fame by Builder Magazine
Professor, Architecture and Urban Design, and Director of the Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies, University of Washington
Sharon E. Sutton has been an architecture educator since 1975, having held positions at Pratt Institute, Columbia University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Michigan, where she became the first African American woman in the United States to be promoted to full professor of architecture. She is a registered architect, certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, and was once a member of the musician’s union in New York City.
The author of numerous books and scholarly and popular publications, Sutton’s research seeks to advance placemaking as a means of resisting and transforming the erasure place-consciousness deriving from global capitalism. Formerly a Kellogg National Fellow as well as a Danforth Fellow, Sutton has degrees in music, architecture, psychology, and philosophy. She is a fellow in the American Institute of Architects, a distinguished professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, an inductee in the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, and recipient of the AIA Whitney M. Young Jr. Award.