Celebrating Design Excellence at the 20th Annual Honors and Awards Luncheon

On Friday, April 24, AIA New York and its supporters gathered at Cipriani Wall Street for the 20th annual Honors and Awards Luncheon, which celebrated architects and industry professionals committed to the growth and success of New York City's architecture community. In addition to recognizing the 24 winners of the 2026 AIANY Design Awards, the Luncheon serves as one of the organization's largest fundraisers. This year's event gathered over 600 members and supporters who came together to raise approximately $380,000 in support of AIA New York, surpassing last year's total. These funds allow our chapter to develop our programming and cultivate a future-forward architectural community.

The first award conferred at the Luncheon was the Architecture in Media Award, formerly known as the Stephen A. Kliment Oculus Award. Since 2003, the award has honored those who set new standards for communicating the value of architecture to a wider community. This year, the Architecture in Media Award honors Head Hi, a cultural organization and bookstore in Brooklyn that connects art, architecture, design, and sound through projects, publications, and public programming. After realizing a need to sustain alternative organizations shaping art and architecture culture, Head Hi was founded in New York City in 2017 by Alvaro Alcocer, a self-taught artist, and Alexandra Hodkowski, whose career in the cultural field spans over 20 years.

The two founders accepted the award. "Through our cultural programming, we bring people together from all walks of life to share stories, think about architecture, and diversify dialogue with fresh perspectives," Hodkowski said. "Against all odds, we have existed for eight years as an independent, woman- and Mexican-owned and operated organization in one of the hardest and most expensive cities," Alcocer said. "This award reaffirms our dedication and encourages us to continue our work and collaborations with architects, scholars, and experts in the field. In an accelerated time dictated by apps, social media overload, and AI, we strongly believe that an independent space like Head Hi must prevail."

The next award presented was the Champion of Architecture Award, first awarded to R. Buckminster Fuller in 1952, which recognizes an individual outside the architectural profession for their contributions to architecture and the built environment. The 2026 Champion of Architecture Award celebrates Sharon Prince, the CEO and Founder of Grace Farms, a globally recognized cultural and humanitarian center in New Canaan, CT, grounded in the belief that space can express and advance values.

Recognizing exploitation in the global building materials supply chain, Prince mobilized industry leaders and launched the Design for Freedom movement in 2020 with a groundbreaking report. Pilot Projects and Toolkits put these ethical sourcing strategies into practice worldwide. The With Every Fiber exhibit educates the public about Design for Freedom at Grace Farms and Prince convenes the Design for Freedom Summit annually with 550 industry leaders. 

Prince accepted the award, sharing some background on the creation of the Design for Freedom movement and its direct relationship with the American Institute of Architects. "It was when I was an AIA National jurist that I figured out and had an epiphany that the entire global construction supply chain has long been given a labor transparency pass," Prince said. "Grace Farms started with an idea-space communicates and could invent values, like grace and peace. It turns out that values and human dignity are embedded in our materials. It also turns out that this antiquated, disaggregated industry is about to have an innovative moment. That is due to the double-aged sword of artificial intelligence. There's a paradox-AI does provide the tools to see through the fog of our building materials supply chain, and yet the rush to build our hyper-scaled data centers skips over the labor inputs of the massive amounts of materials like concrete and cabling that are required."

The program's third award was the New Perspectives Award, which celebrates individuals or collectives who, through their own recently published or curated work, take unique, critical positions that contribute to the broader understanding of architecture. This year's recipient is BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, an organization that has bridged gaps between people, place, and power to realize racial justice in Black communities since its founding in 2015. BlackSpace facilitates opportunities for urbanists and creatives to co-create social and spatial change. They share tools and strategies through educational workshops and ethical and speculative design to enact individual, community-based, and systemic change. They have completed seven neighborhood-level projects to resist Black cultural erasure, launched four workshops reaching over 6,000 people across New York state, and distributed two publications reaching 22 million people worldwide. BlackSpace's newest program, Kinfolx Imagining Neighborhoods, also known as Studio KIN, is an urbanist entrepreneurship accelerator aimed at reimagining how communities are planned, revitalized, and built.

On behalf of the organization, Emma Osore, one of the co-founders of BlackSpace, accepted the award. "We started as a small group gathering in each other's tiny apartments, really concerned with cultural erasure in central Brooklyn. Today, we've grown into a national movement to interrupt urbanism as usual and to bring justice and joy into community development," Osore said. "For many of us early collective members, BlackSpace has kept us thriving within fields often not built for us. Early members like Ujiji Davis Williams and Ifeoma Ebo, whose first independent projects as firms that we commissioned, are now leading powerful work across art, land, and architecture. Like them, many of us found Blackspace as a supportive community for place-based heritage project work and entrepreneurship. And that kind of investment that we've made over the long-term shows up in neighborhoods to fight neighborhood cultural erasure. From redesigning a youth-led farm in climate-vulnerable NYCHA land in Red Hook to creating more accessible cultural spaces in Brownsville that preserve over 6,000 Black artifacts, we've engaged thousands of residents and directed millions directly into public space projects in combating local erasure."

The day's final award was the Medal of Honor, the Chapter's highest distinction, conferred to an architect or architecture firm for a distinguished body of work and high professional standing. This year, the Medal of Honor was awarded to Alloy Development, a real estate development company committed to making Brooklyn beautiful, sustainable, and equitable. As architects and developers, they see opportunity in the diversity and complexity of our urban context, and use great architecture and thoughtful development to positively impact the built environment. The fundamental promise of Alloy's business has always been driven by the belief that rigorous analysis and quality design can create enduring and recognizable value. Through its unique organizational culture, they challenge the architecture and real estate disciplines by questioning existing practices and proposing new ways to benefit the social and built environments.

Alloy President AJ Pires accepted the award on behalf of the group, acknowledging its 20th anniversary and foundational idea that architects could gain more agency over the process of making buildings by being developers. "Thank you to the AIA for supporting alternative models of practice and welcoming us," he said. "It's really so rewarding to be recognized in this room because this is not about economic success, which is very different than a lot of the real estate things we go to. The values that AIA upholds, the values that many of us in the room hold, and that we aspire to, are about using this wonderful education and this great occupation, which is all about envisioning something that doesn't exist, to make for a better future. What we're so proud of in our practice is not that we've gained more agency by taking more risk or that we've proven that architects can be developers, but with that agency and access, we've had the privilege to show our industry what priorities and values architects might value. If there was one wish that could come from this reward it would be that the recognition of the first real estate development company to win this award might inspire other architects to find the agency to express their values on their own terms."

Also honored were the Design Awards winners, including The Davis Center at the Harlem Meer, The Eliza and Inwood Library-Joseph and Sheila Rosenblatt Building, the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob's Pillow, and more. Be sure to stop by the 2026 AIANY Design Awards exhibition, on view at the Center for Architecture from May 7 through September 2, 2026, to explore the 24 winning projects.

Thank you to all who helped make our 2026 Luncheon such a memorable afternoon!