LPA’s sustainable design evolution wins AIA Architecture Firm Award

by Christopher Brinckerhoff | January 13, 2025 6:00 am

[1]The board of directors and the strategic council of the American Institute of Architects (AIA)[2] honored LPA Design Studios[3] with the 2025 AIA Architecture Firm Award.

The annual AIA Architecture Firm Award is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture practice. The award recognizes firms that consistently produce distinguished architecture for at least 10 years.

Founded in 1965, LPA has grown to encompass more than 400 employees throughout six studios in California and Texas. The firm’s early work, designing spec offices exclusively for developers with tight constraints, required LPA to use materials wisely and creatively.

In the 1980s, as the savings and loan crisis spiraled, LPA broadened its market to include K-12 educational facilities. The firm’s command of the economy has been valuable for public schools, which often seek impact with limited and inflexible budgets. Since then, public schools have grown to represent nearly 50 percent of the firm’s practice. Its excellence in that sector has received six awards from AIA’s committee on architecture for education and 42 awards from the AIA California chapter.

LPA demonstrated its sustainable leadership in 1998 when it designed a LEED new construction-certified building, Premier Automotive Group’s headquarters.

In 2004, the firm established new rigorous performance goals that required every project it designed to exceed California’s Title 24 energy-use goals by 25 percent. LPA also pursued AIA’s 2030 Commitment.

As a firm with more than 100 employees, it met the 70 percent energy reduction target in 2018 and 2019 across its portfolio of nearly 1,114,837 m² (12 million sf).

Projects such as the Environmental Nature Center Campus in Newport Beach, Calif., demonstrate LPA’s commitment to education and the environment. The nature center is a certified LEED Platinum, net-zero energy building which opened in 2008. A preschool was added in 2019, extending the center’s mission and creating a sustainable facility for nature-based education for young children.

A few miles away in Irvine, Calif., LPA designed a LEED Platinum auditorium for Edwards Lifesciences. The net-zero energy space bridges two existing office buildings for the company and serves as a gathering spot and a new entryway for the corporate headquarters. A culture of breaking down hierarchies between disciplines and fostering collaboration has blossomed inside the interdisciplinary firm. LPA invests in education across the firm. Today, the staff comprises 46 percent women and 41 percent racial and ethnic minorities. It pursues equity through annual gender pay audits and by supporting its equity, diversity, and inclusion advisory committee in creating open dialogues with employees.

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/news/industry-news/lpa-aia-architecture/

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