(August 14, 2025. Sacramento, California) A continued commitment by California-based architects to serve communities and clients through projects that reconnect neighborhoods, invite access to once-lost rivers, and replace parking lots with green space categorize the six recipients of the 2025 AIA California Urban Design Awards. Honored projects extend from Northern California to San Francisco to Nashville to Chicago with recipients re-working parking lots, addressing land surrounding sports stadiums, reconsidering freeway ramps, and rejuvenating of public space at a once-isolated industrial pier. Throughout all, neighborhoods were linked to green space. “Return to the River: A Bridge to Health” not only relinked the people of the Yurok Tribe to a sacred river, physically, and treated the river as client, but wove together visions of place from past, present, and future generations.
“We are delighted to see California members’ influence throughout the country,” said 2025 AIA California President Carina Mills, AIA. “Each celebrated project embodies ideas and goals incorporated in our organization’s strategic plan, reflecting the values of the profession and amplifying the important work AIA members are doing in their communities.”
2025 is also the third year AIA California has hosted a Student award division through its Urban Design Awards Program. As all AIA California award recipients are, students will be invited to the organization’s annual awards celebration. This year taking place at University of California, Berkeley, on November 21.
See a full list of recipients below. For images of each project and highlights, click here.
HONOR
The 1901 Project by United Center Joint Venture (Chicago, Illinois)
RIOS with Field Operations
This project will dramatically impact its area in a positive way, engaging the community, with or without a ticket. It integrates and creates frontages along neighborhoods while drawing activity through the site, and creates public open space, green streets, promotes transit, walkability, bikeability, and well-being. Its Regenerative Placemaking will activate the site into one that brings the community together. The new regenerative urban ecosystem promotes sustainability and intelligent use of available resources
MERIT
Exploratorium at Piers 15 & 17 (San Francisco)
GLS Landscape | Architecture with EHDD
The Exploratorium reclaims a once-isolated industrial pier, reconnecting it to the pulse of the city and elevating it as a site of civic life. It embraces the pier’s layered history while threading-in forward-looking sustainability measures. More than just a refined technical and aesthetic feat, the project is a living demonstration of how urban renewal can foster social generosity and environmental stewardship. The sustainable design and intelligent use of available resources is exemplary. Bravo.
Imagine East Bank Nashville Plan (Nashville, Tennessee)
Perkins Eastman
An ambitious and thoughtful framework that reclaims a large stretch of riverfront and recasts it as an inclusive, dense, and interwoven urban district which is a departure from the car-centric patterns that have long defined the area. Especially compelling is how the plan uses the riverfront as a civic stage, layering it with pedestrian and multimodal networks, cultural anchors, and landscapes that respond and adapt to changing climates. The design elevates the human experience while addressing the project’s practical needs and takes a progressive approach to advancing the missions of sustainability and resiliency.
Return to the River: A Bridge to Health (Klamath, California)
Yurok Tribe Planning and EinwillerKuehl Landscape Architecture
This project is placemaking in a natural environment that pays homage to its setting, its past, and the indigenous people who have lived here for thousands of years while innovatively dealing with a freeway that interrupts it all. Important engagement of community and tribal members resulted in effective strategies to achieve the goal of healthy humans, non-humans and natural resources (the river).
The Ring-On Ramp (Los Angeles, California)
YNL Architects
This is a provocative urban-landscape proposal that overlays mobility, sustainability, community, and food insecurity onto a singular architectural project. It’s an ambitious bid not just to house these programs and conditions, but to choreograph them: turning the site into a living performance and a new social and civic space that could truly define the area. The goal of reclaiming wasted or underused spaces due to freeway on-ramps is laudable.
Stonestown Framework Plan (San Francisco, California)
SITELAB urban studio, Project Lead and Urban Design | EinwillerKuehl, Landscape | David Baker Architects, Architect
This project checks off all the boxes of reintegrating malls and housing, which is such a challenge. There is a clear and thoughtful intention in how the project weaves together culture, ecology, and mobility. The designers had purpose, based on a polemic that came from holistic understanding of the people and place (landscape, site, flora and fauna), and created a project that seeks to repair the relationships between them.
HONOR
Industrial Nirvana
Huixin Huang, Yangyang Sun, Xingyu Zhou, Conghui Chen
A comprehensive concept and study, that is very well done and addresses multiple aspects for the transformssation. The scale is impressive and the eco concept is likewise which provides needed relief for the very high density surrounding it.
MERIT
The Flowscape
Ruiqiao Wang
This is a thoughtful and ambitious student project that takes the sensitivity of small-scale responses to sea level rise and brings it to the scale of the city. There is a quiet strength in how it considers the life and possibility that can be drawn from the vulnerabilities of our urban systems in the face of environmental challenges.
The Vanier Place
Frank Wen Yao
Sustainability here isn’t just a box to check, it’s the anchor of the project and that’s good to see. The goal of providing local residences sustainable public spaces and human-nature interactions is strong.
2025 Urban Design Awards recipients were selected by a jury comprised of: Barbara Bouza, FAIA – Executive Director, Cannon Design: Cory Henry – Founder of Atelier Cory Henry & Professor at University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture; Douglas Austin, FAIA – Founder and Chairman of AVRP Studios; Hazel Edwards – Professor at Howard University; Kevin Keller, AICP – Executive Officer at Los Angeles City Planning; and Suzanne Brown – Principal at Equity Community Builders.
