Community Design Center Project Among Winners of Top American Architecture Award

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Award winning design

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Porchscapes: A LEED Neighborhood Development, a joint project by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Ecological Engineering Group and McClelland Consulting Engineers Inc., is a winner of a 2009 American Architecture Award.

The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

The awards, sponsored by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, are among the most prestigious awards for American architecture. The awards “identify new cutting-edge design direction, urban philosophy, design approach, style, and intellectual substance in American Architecture today.” The 64 winners of the 2009 awards ranged from skyscrapers to private homes for international clients and were chosen from nearly 1,000 candidates.

 The Porchscapes design will be featured with the other winners in an exhibition, “New American Architecture,” which will open in Athens, Greece, and then begin a national tour in the U.S.

“We are pleased that our unique consortium of nonprofits, government agencies and a professional practice is competitive in design quality with some of the most intensely capitalized projects in the world,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

Design for LEED neighborhood development.

Porchscapes is a 43-unit affordable housing neighborhood, designed to demonstrate low impact development technologies in water management. It is a pilot project in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Neighborhood Development program, sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, and the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle.

The American Architecture Award is the fourth national design award the Community Design Center has received for the Porchscapes project.