We are no longer accepting submissions for this year's Vitruvian Honors & Awards. The links below are no longer active. Register for the award ceremony here.
The Facade Tectonics Institute’s Vitruvian Honors & Awards program celebrated outstanding achievements in the field of facade design and delivery. The program recognized outstanding projects, as well as project teams and individuals that have made extraordinary contributions to facade design, engineering, fabrication, installation and lifecycle performance. The projects and contributions demonstrated the goals of the Institute in advancing the art, science and technology of designing, planning, and constructing high-performance building facades for the benefit of the planet and people.
FTI's Vitruvian Honors & Awards Committee worked collaboratively to develop seven distinct categories that are emblematic of The Institute's vision and mission as well as celebrate innovation, collaboration and achievement within the AECO industry. During an awards ceremony, an award recipient was announced in each of the following categories.
To learn more about submission requirements and project guidelines, explore the award categories linked below:
Refer to the individual Award categories for submission requirements (see links above for project and people award categories).
Judges are thought-leaders from a cross section of the AECO industry, in keeping with the FTI mission. Members of the jury credited in an entry, or whose organization of employment is otherwise related to the entry, will be recused from judging that submission.
Winners will be honored at the biennial Vitruvian Honors & Awards Ceremony. Finalists will have the opportunity to present their project at the FTI biennial Vitruvian Honors & Awards Symposium, in the afternoon prior to the ceremony.
Our climate is in crisis, representing nothing short of an existential threat to humanity. We are chagrined to acknowledge that buildings—our business—are a major part of the problem. Yet this awareness has failed to drive corrective action. We continue to move in the wrong direction, carbon ppm continues to rise along with species extinction and environmental destruction. We recognize the building skin as the lynchpin to achieving resilience and sustainability goals in buildings and urban habitat; nothing in architecture combines attributes of both performance and appearance as does the building facade. You, today’s project teams, are building our future. We must drive change; in thinking, in regulations, in practices, in tools and techniques. We hereby challenge building teams—utilizing the building skin as a mechanism of whole-building integration—to disrupt the conversation, to move the building arts and sciences from a big part of the problem to a leading component of the global solution.
It is our hope that the Vitruvian Honors program will significantly contribute to the following:
New processes for designing, testing, modeling, procuring, fabricating and assembling deeply integrated buildings and facade systems.
A deeper understanding of the lifecycle performance of facade system materials and assemblies.
Formal and performative design practices based on anticipated climate change and predicted climate data as opposed to historical data.
Adaptive facade designs that optimize passive strategies first but integrate carbon neutral or carbon positive strategies as appropriate to realize lifecycle health and environmental goals.
Utilization of the facade system as the key to a deeper level of building systems integration with the aim of achieving lifecycle and environmental goals.
The utilization of empirical over modeling methods, wherever possible, in exploring design alternatives, and the use of empirical evidence to calibrate modeling processes.
Accelerate the transformation to truly resilient and sustainable built environments.
The biennial Vitruvian Honors & Awards program will culminate in a symposium and awards ceremony with the inaugural event to be held Thursday, December 2, 2021. The deadline for honors and award submissions is Monday, October 4, 2021.