(September 26, 2024. Sacramento, CA)— Paulett Taggart, FAIA, the 2024 Maybeck Award recipient, creates exemplary community-serving architecture that is equitable, sustainable, and enduring. Since she founded her eponymous firm in 1986, she has quietly advanced social equity through architecture with mission driven work that brings good design to all, especially those who often have less access to it.
Named for Bernard Ralph Maybeck, the California architect who has influenced designers for over a century, the Maybeck Award recognizes outstanding achievement in architectural design as expressed in a body of work produced by an individual architect over a period of at least 10 years.
The 2024 Maybeck Awards jury not only commended the quality of Taggart’s four decade-long body of work and its wide range and scale – from community facilities to housing – but her unique approach to serving the people and placemaking in the Bay Area, where her firm is based.
“Without calling attention to herself, Paulett Taggart, FAIA, improves the environment with clarity and discipline,” said the Jury in awarding the architect the highest design award the AIA California bestows on an individual architect. “She is a wonderful designer, with beautiful social benefit projects, whose career has been selfless and public-focused.”
“What do we want out of the next generation of architects?: Paulett Taggart is the model for that,” the Jury noted.
Taggart’s commitment to mission driven work and her capabilities to realize design excellence were visible from the beginning.
“Since we were students together at the University of Oregon fifty years ago, […] her acute design intelligence and dedication to making things right stood out among our peers,” wrote the late Marsha Maytum, FAIA, in support of Taggart’s Maybeck Awards submission. Maytum went on to note the expansion of these foundations. “In small but impactful projects […] she has repeatedly demonstrated the power of architecture to enhance the lives of diverse individuals and strengthen the communities they inhabit”; more recent work in affordable, supportive housing “has successfully translated those principles to a larger, more urban scale.”
In making the award, the Jury also recognized Taggart’s “admirable and meaningful” collaborative approach, with both other architects and communities.
In accepting the 2024 Maybeck Award, Taggart said, “It is a joy to practice the kind of work we do in the Bay Area. Producing buildings that respond to the special qualities of this place while serving distinct communities is a fulfilling endeavor. I am both honored and humbled to receive this award and join the prestigious list of recipients that came before me. Architecture is not an individual sport; success comes through collaboration, and a collective vision and purpose. I am the thread that runs through all the work, but I share the honor of this award with the team at PTA.”
Taggart’s designs evolve out of a deep understanding of the Bay Area’s unique environment—of the region’s architecture, topography, and quality of light. Her buildings reinterpret, in contemporary language, the patterns of San Francisco: the rhythm of parcels and bays, scale and proportion of openings, and episodic views into mid-block outdoor space. They capture and balance the changeable light of this fog-bound city. The result is an architecture that celebrates and enriches its surroundings, an architecture that is meant to be here.
The 2024 Maybeck Award jury was comprised of : Jim Burnett, FASLA – President and Partner, OJB Landscape Architecture; Michael Hsu, FAIA, IIDA, NOMA – Founder and Principal, Michael Hsu Office of Architecture (MHOA); Alison Mears, AIA, LEED AP – Associate Professor of Architecture, Parsons, and Director and Co-Founder of Parson Healthy Materials Lab (HML); Margaret Montgomery, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, WELL AP, LFA – Principal, NBBJ; Jim Zack, AIA – Founding Principal, Zack/de Vito Architecture + Construction.
About the American Institute of Architects California (AIA California)
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. It celebrates more than 75 years of service and, today, is composed of more than 11,000 members across the state.
