Another F**king Architecture Award?

Architizer News

Another F**king Architecture Award?

November 28, 2012

Fill in your architecture awards here.

I just got this email from a friend about the Architizer A+ Awards: “Marc, another f@#*king architecture award? You have to be kidding me.”

Honestly, it sucks to get a reaction like this, but I totally understand where it is coming from. It seems like everyday my inbox is full with messages from this and that architecture competition announcing deadlines, entry details, and winners. Oh yeah, and asking for money, sometimes a lot of money. As an architect I don’t mind spending money on marketing, and winning awards is great—my staff loves it, my clients love it, my Mom really loves it—but I don’t understand the value of many of the awards that I am asked to enter. Continue.

I get emails—and I’m sure I am not the only one—that try to tempt me to enter an awards program by showing me middle-aged architects and engineers gathered around a table judging the entries. First I kind of chuckle because it just seems like the most boring thing imaginable, but then I get sad. I get sad because our profession has had its fill of talking to each other; it’s time to reach out and get the world excited about what we do. We don’t need a few architects telling other architects about the best architecture. We need to hear from tech innovators, developers, designers, politicians and whoever else cares about buildings. We need to make them into fans and eventually into clients.

Architizer is on a quest to boost the field’s relevance by filtering architecture into people’s daily media stream. That is why we partnered with the team behind the Webby Awards, who did the exact same thing for tech-heads and programmers. That is why we have people like Olafur Eliasson, who did the same thing for art, and Ian Schrager, who did the same thing for hotels.

We are on a mission to make the A+ Awards the vehicle for reminding the general public of what makes architecture special, and with partners like The Huffington Post, we are going to achieve it. The deadline for entry is December 21st, so hurry! You can’t win if you don’t enter!