(September 18, 2025. Sacramento, CA) A wide array of architects with work running the gamut of typologies—from exemplary civic work and multi-family housing to an urban mausoleum—were recognized as AIA California Design Awards recipients for 2025. Together, the work demonstrates how design excellence contributes to contemporary life no matter the site of a project, its use, or the income of its users. Recipients delivered significant architecture on challenging sites located amidst busy thorough fares and conversely, respectfully attuned work to tranquil natural environments.
This type of variety was reflected in the three projects bestowed an Honor award, the highest level Design Award recognized: a college expansion by Studio Gang that sets a truly high bar for the realization of buildings on academic campuses; a civic center by SOM that offers an inviting presence within an urban context; and a single-family residence by Field Architecture that offers an exemplary approach to its Big Sur site. Each integrates rigorous sustainability requirements within their design.
This work is joined by eighteen stellar Merit and Citation recipients. Projects encompass affordable housing for medical interns; the transformation of a warehouse into a non-profit’s performance space; vibrant retail, civic, and institutional spaces; reconsiderations of shipping containers, and more.
“I am honored to lead an organization whose membership is so adept at elevating quality of life,” stated 2025 AIA California President Carina Mills, AIA. “AIA California is committed to professional opportunities and advocacy that nurture and catalyze great work. To see this year’s 2025 Design Awards recipients is to see professionals harness new and exciting strategies to produce design excellence. Congratulations to all recipients.”
The 2025 AIA California Design Awards recipients, along with their jury notes, are:
500 County Center (Redwood City, California)
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
This project achieves excellence across the board, from its urban design and siting—creating a civic presence within an urban context—but also inviting and welcoming the public in. It elevates civic architecture to a very high level, while at the same time embracing innovative, resilient, sustainable technologies such as mass timber passive design. It really hangs together, both in terms of a piece of architecture, the interiors, and again, as a as a piece of civic architecture.
Big Sur House (Big Sur, California)
Field Architecture
A truly exceptional project with an exemplary approach to site, massing, materiality, tectonic expression, and spatial choreography. The geometric organization in plan and section is well-crafted and the bifurcated pavilions beautifully allow for the passage of the coastal stream from the hillside to the ocean. The ambition to thoroughly bridge climate, ecology, and design result in a beautiful, architecturally significant home. The site is addressed beautifully.
California College of the Arts Campus Expansion (San Francisco, California)
Studio Gang
This is an exemplary project across all criteria. Clear program and concept, beautiful and innovative tectonics, rich materials, wonderful spatial variety, and clearly organized plan. This project sets a very high bar for excellence in academic architecture and sets the stage for future growth and upgrades for this institution’s next 100 years. Innovative mass timber structure and passive systems continue the trajectory of CCA’s cutting edge sustainability program.
843 N Spring Street (Los Angeles, California)
LEVER Architecture
A very good example of a complete architectural statement, in the sense that it has a very clearly organized site plan and building plan, highly rational and an economical use of materials, and is very evident in how it’s made and how it’s constructed. It touches on all of the most important aspects of truly good architecture.
FHCSD El Cerrito (San Diego, California)
LPA Design Studios
This project takes the humble shipping container that we’ve seen ubiquitously, but applies it in a sophisticated way, in a refined organization that feels dignified. Very well done in terms of massing, fenestration, tectonic expression, and material and colors. It delivers 172 affordable, 100% electric units which is an extraordinary achievement.
Gower Court Mausoleum (Los Angeles, California)
Lehrer Architects and Roberto Sheinberg Arquitectura y Diseño (AyD)
A beautiful, sculptural work of architecture that provides a real, significant, new use to the idea of a mausoleum in an urban environment. It is a welcome addition to this neighborhood in the city.
Intuit Dome (Inglewood, California)
AECOM
This project sets the tone for the next generation of this kind of high performance in a typology that has often not seen that kind of performance as well as kind of user experience.
Isla Intersections Supportive Housing & Paseo (Los Angeles, California)
Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA]A beautiful, inventive use of shipping containers in a playful, gestural way that relates to its unusually shaped site with the highways in the background. It creates an inviting place for people to live, and a sense of community.
Mosaic at Embarcadero Center (San Francisco, California)
Gensler
Absolutely beautiful and flawlessly executed update of these sadly underutilized retail spaces. These renovations are perfect examples of creating harmony with the spirit and architectural language of the existing building while updating and elevating the spaces to contemporary and innovative ideas for re-use.
Sunnyvale City Hall (Sunnyvale, California)
SmithGroup
Sunnyvale City Hall is the gold standard for civic buildings. It goes beyond human-centered design to life-centered design. It embodies design excellence for its ambitious public-facing program, remarkable achievements in sustainability (Certified net-zero energy use and LEED Platinum), and its beautiful aesthetic qualities.
200 W Ocean (Long Beach, California)
Studio One Eleven
Despite the hype about office to residential conversion, it’s not an easy feat to do it successfully. This project navigates those waters gracefully and has converted what was a nondescript, Class B office tower into a successful, welcoming residential community with some interesting units and community building amenity spaces, and reactivates the urbanism at the street frontage in Long Beach along the way as well.
1450 Owens (Mission Bay, San Francisco, California)
IwamotoScott Architecture & DGA
Architecture is ultimately about resolution and about what how one sees through details to the conclusion of construction; this building really does that with great merit. It is clearly a building that is essentially of the freeway. But it’s also a building of wonderful sculptural qualities at a large urban scale. A tough but handsome, well resolved, transparent, welcoming addition to this part of San Francisco.
Cañada College Kinesiology and Wellness Center (Redwood City, California)
ELS Architecture and Urban Design
This building takes advantage of its site on a hilltop, and responds to that through an expressive roof form that both makes it a landmark within the landscape, but also functions well to provide shade for the programs. It elevates the typology of a sports complex within a community college into a really well-resolved and fully thought-out work of architecture.
Debbie Allen Dance Academy (Los Angeles, California)
Gensler
Elegant adaptive reuse, this project exemplifies the potential of a genuinely transformative architectural renovation. Beautiful open spaces on the interior are well-considered and allow for a flexible range of community-based programs. The building provides a wonderful performance and community space for the for the community.
Edes Building (Morgan Hill, California)
KTGY
A beautifully executed jewel box of a small building that has a very clear concept that is born out in its form, its structure, its materiality and the detailing. There’s an equivalency between the care that was taken with both the exterior facades, some very strategic urban gestures, opening the building up to the community, all the way to the fun and innovative exhibit designs that are integrated into the architecture.
Granville1500 (Los Angeles, California)
Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects
The choice of a single material allows the forms of the building to express themselves clearly. This is a great example of a building that takes the four stories over a podium and successfully weaves the building down to the street level. You don’t even notice that it’s on a podium.
Lehi Park Bathrooms (Santa Cruz Mountains, California)
Fuse Architects + Builders
An oasis in the middle of the woods, and the fact that it survived a wildfire largely unharmed, untouched, is a testament to its fire resistance, setting an important tone given climate change. The formal solution is elegant yet simple, elevating its typology–a fully resolved gem of a small building. It’s so rare that one finds a building that exceeds its function in such a dramatic and handsome way.
Mar Vista House No. 1 (Los Angeles, California)
Hopson Rodstrom Design Co.
The design stands out for its simplicity and elegance. A simple but beautiful tectonic concept using the grain of the glulam beams to organize the plan as well as the expression of interior spaces, and the continuity of indoors to outdoors.
Palm Springs Homeless Navigation Center (Palm Springs, California)
John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects
This is a container building, used in a rather innovative and fun fashion. As a center for people in crisis, it feels welcoming and accessible–a place of shelter. The space allows people access to privacy, but also to communal spaces, which are really lovely. It works with the site so well to mediate between the adaptive reuse of those industrial buildings and yet also opens and weaves perfectly into the mountains beyond.
San Francisco State University, George and Judy Marcus Hall for the Creative Arts (San Francisco, California)
Mark Cavagnero Associates
This is a building which combines the rigor of a very carefully edited esthetic vocabulary, with issues of sustainability, issues of clarity, of use, and scale within its neighborhood. It is clearly a building that was constructed carefully—probably due to the care that the architect brought to the entire process. A complete statement about what good architecture can and should be: limited, careful, edited, restrained, but an elegant and complete solution to a problem.
Stanford Residence (Stanford, California)
Jensen Architects
The Stanford residence is an exuberant embodiment of its client, and this, the workshop space is delightful, especially given the context of its neighborhood. The renovation of the existing house adjacent to it is also consistently surprising and offers delight in a way that kind of foreshadows that that new workshop space introduced. So the entire experience of the house has a consistent quality of surprise and delight.
The 2025 AIA California Design Awards recipients were selected by an accomplished jury of six:
About the American Institute of Architects California (AIA CA)
AIA California is dedicated to serving its members, and uniting all architecture professionals in the design of a more just, equitable, and resilient future through advocacy, education, and political action. The organization represents the interests of more than 11,000 architects and allied professionals in California. Founded in 1944, the AIA CA is the largest component of the national AIA organization. For more information, visit www.aiacalifornia.org
