Tulanians honored at AIA NOLA Design Awards

AUGUSt 6, 2025

BY Shyla Krishnappa

Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment faculty, staff, and alumni have received multiple honors at the AIA New Orleans 2025 Design Awards. The AIA New Orleans Design Awards celebrate the best of New Orleans Architecture and Design, admiring our community’s achivements and recognizing the best of our built environment.

This year’s awards spotlight the powerful role New Orleans architects play in shaping a built environment that is beautiful, purposeful, and resilient. From bold new builds to sensitive restorations, the honored designs represent the cutting edge of what our community is capable of contributing to the built environment. Experience an evening of elevated design, meaningful dialogue, and recognition of the architects and firms who are reimagining what it means to design for and with our communities.

The Small Center's SPROUT House Pavilion was the overwhelming winner of the People's Choice Award. Students from the Tulane School of Architecture built a new shade pavilion and outdoor classroom on the Lafitte Greenway, an abandoned railroad corridor that has been transformed into a vibrant public green space since its opening in 2015.

The corridor has been in use for more than two centuries, having previously been a shipping canal in the late 1700s. The Tulane project is a collaboration with the school's Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design and Sprout NOLA, an agriculture non-profit working to build a stronger, more equipped community of growers in Louisiana and help all New Orleanians be part of a community food system.

In addition, Favrote Assosicate Professor Adam Marcus received a Small Scale Commendation for his Variable Projects submission of the project "Arbor". Arbor is a sculptural installation commissioned for the City of Palo Alto, CA. It is a data spatialization of the urban forest of Palo Alto. The sculptural installation consists of 120 ribs arranged radially within King Plaza at Palo Alto City Hall. It uses the database of over 45,000 public trees in the city’s Open Data Portal as the basis for a collective, three-dimensional map of one aspect of the city’s ecology: all trees in the public realm.

Tulane's URBANbuild has also won a Residential Commendation. New Orleans-based firm Eskew Dumez Ripple won many awards as usual, and we can celebrate them with Steve Dumez on our team.