Ehrlich Architects receives 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award

The Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) voted for Ehrlich Architects to receive the 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The firm will be honored at the 2015 AIA National Convention in Atlanta. Ehrlich Architects is renowned for fluidly melding classic California Modernist style with multicultural and vernacular design elements by including marginalized design languages and traditions.

The AIA Architecture Firm Award, given annually, is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years. ??The work of Ehrlich Architects covers a wide variety of program types (residential, commercial, institutional, educational) and uses a much richer palette of materials and textures than the typical California Modernist-influenced firm. However, they are most distinguished by the subtle and complex way they blend Modernist and multicultural design elements.

Before founding his Los Angeles-based firm in 1979, Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, spent time working with the Peace Corps in Africa. There, Ehrlich gained an appreciation for simple, natural materials and vernacular solutions to energy, sustainability, and building performance challenges. Back in Southern California, Ehrlich found opportunities to renovate properties designed by architects high up in the California Modernist canon (like Richard Neutra, FAIA), which helped him to develop a confident, loose-limbed, but still traditional Modernist aesthetic. But his experiences in Africa, with building traditions created years before Modernism demanded a total rupture with the past, pushed him to develop an architecture that was more inclusive, responsible, and responsive than pure Modernism.

Ehrlich Architects is led today by four diverse partners whose personal backgrounds and experiences result in a unique cultural sensitivity and a commitment to creating architecture that is globally relevant. They are: Steven Ehrlich, FAIA; Takashi Yanai, AIA; Patricia Rhee, AIA; and Mathew Chaney, AIA.

To fulfill these goals, Ehrlich Architects see themselves as “architectural anthropologists”—exploring ancient, developing-world building traditions and situating them in contemporary buildings to solve contemporary problems. Japanese-style courtyards, Middle Eastern lattice screens, and vernacular mud construction have all been ways they enrich contemporary architecture with age-old multicultural building elements.

“The marriage of the particular with the universal is one of the great virtues of the firm’s design approach, where connections between culture, climate, people and place are woven together in a distinct humanistic architecture shaped by circumstance,” wrote Steve Dumez, FAIA in a letter of recommendation.?A few of their most notable projects include:

The Ahmadu Bello University Theater in Zaria, Nigeria., The Federal National Council Parliament Building Complex in Abu Dhabi, UAE, The 700 Palms Residence in Los Angeles, Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and The John Roll U.S. Courthouse in Yuma, Arizona.

Ehrlich Architects is the 52nd AIA Architecture Firm Award recipient. Previous recipients of the AIA Firm Award include, Eskew + Dumez + Ripple (2013), VJAA (2012), BNIM (2011), Pugh + Scarpa (2010), Kieran Timberlake (2008), Muphy/Jahn (2005), Polshek Partnership (1992), Venturi, Raunch, and Scott Brown (1985), I.M. Pei and Partners (1968), and SOM (1962).

The American Institute of Architects  Founded in 1857, members of the American Institute of Architects consistently work to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings, neighborhoods, and communities. Through nearly 300 state and local chapters, the AIA advocates for public policies that promote economic vitality and public well being.  Members adhere to a code of ethics and conduct to ensure the highest professional standards. The AIA provides members with tools and resources to assist them in their careers and business as well as engaging civic and government leaders, and the public to find solutions to pressing issues facing our communities, institutions, nation and world. Visit www.aia.org.