Interface Studio Architects LLC, a boutique architecture firm in Philadelphia that specializes in new urbanism and sustainability, went home from the weeklong DesignPhiladelphia event with five awards from the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
With three Honor Awards for design, the Philadelphia Young Architect Award, and the Philadelphia Emerging Architecture Prize, ISA showed an unusual dominance of the field; the design awards jury gave out 12 citations, three of which went to ISA.
The Honor Awards were for three very different projects: a small urban art gallery, a 40,000-square-foot grocery store and the 1,000-square-foot ultra-green 100K House. Each involved a highly specialized approach that underlies ISA’s business and design philosophy, according to founder Brian Phillips.
“We all came from large office environments and we wanted to focus our energies on smaller projects we could really think through,” says Phillips.
ISA’s Daryn Edwards won AIA’s Young Architect Award. Edwards joined the firm late last year, one of several hires that have grown the company from one employee in 2005 to seven full-time employees today.
For the first time this year, AIA awarded the Philadelphia Emerging Architecture Prize, of which ISA was a co-recipient. The prize recognizes young firms that exhibit a strong potential to expand the design quality of the Philadelphia architecture community in the early stages of their practices.
Phillips says that ISA’s gross receipts for 2008 are two to three times what they were in 2007, and he is expecting more growth in 2009.
Source: ISA, Brian Phillips
Writer: John Davidson
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