The American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Washington Council recognized the new Vashon High School and its design team at Integrus Architecture with its highest award for civic design at an award ceremony earlier this month.
“This is something we are really so proud of,” said Brian Carter, a Vashon architect who led the project’s team at Integrus. “Our design team is very talented and committed to K-12 work. It’s hard for school projects to be recognized like this.”
AIA’s Washington Council started the Civic Design Awards Program about 25 years ago as a nod to architecture’s effect on the public realm and its involvement in building community as well as to promote quality design in public projects. To be considered for the awards, designs must be for fully or partially publicly funded projects that demonstrate high standards in sustainability, innovation, building performance and overall integration with the client and the surrounding community.
The Civic Design Awards program has three levels of recognition — citation, merit and honor, with honor being the highest. Multiple projects may be recognized in each category, but this year only the Vashon High School project was given the top honor by a unanimous jury decision.
“They really seemed to see the things that were important to the firm in the design phase,” Carter said. “The whole tip of the hat to the agrarian nature of the one-room schoolhouse in this small community spoke to the jurors.”
That particular design element was the deep red that was chosen for the school’s exterior as an ode to the idea of the “little red schoolhouse,” Carter said.
As noted in a transcript of the award ceremony, many of the building’s other details made an impression on the jury.
“The architecture was so exciting,” one juror commented. “Not only could you see it being a great community building and a great process in order to create it, but it also worked at so many levels — from the details, to the plan, to the placemaking. … All of those things went together to be really successful in the end. It was easy for us to constantly come back and admire it.”
Carter credited the Vashon School District as the client, its contractor Skanska and the island community as a whole with the collaboration the team needed to see its visions through.
“You can’t do great civic architecture without a client group that wants it, and the district did so well in managing that between Michael (Soltman) and Eric (Gill),” he said.
With an emotional nod to Gill, the school district’s capital facilities director who died from cancer in February, Carter said that the award belonged as much to him as it did to his team.
“This was his passion. He was on this project for over a decade, and he realized and truly believed in its importance to this community more than anyone,” he said.
