On Wednesday, April 5, 2023, OFA and BAM presented over $15,000 in 2023 Scholarships! OFA is proud to honor these exceptional students in our 2+2+2 program benefiting students from Valencia College, UCF, UF CityLab, and BAM Orlando. The event was held at the Dr.Phillips Center for the Performing Arts to celebrate our future architects in the making. The evening wrapped with a special guest lecture by AIA's Gold Medal recipients Brooks + Scarpa.
Los Angeles architecture firm Brooks + Scarpa, recently honored with the 2022 AIA Gold Medal, is a multi-disciplinary practice that includes architecture, landscape architecture, planning, environmental design, materials research, graphic, furniture, and interior design services that produces innovative, sustainable iconic buildings and urban environments. Their exemplary work, which seamlessly blends architecture, art and craft, has garnered international acclaim for the creative use of materials in unique and unexpected ways, and challenges conventional approaches to design in order to more fully enhance the human experience. The firm has also been recognized for pioneering more holistic approaches to delivering award winning environmentally responsive designs. By reworking the processes of design and building – with material, form, construction, light, and even financing – the firm culls out latent potentials in their projects to make the ordinary extraordinary. This talk will describe Brooks + Scarpa’s journey of discovery with design as a way to connect people, places, and experiences.
Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa have garnered international acclaim for the creative use of conventional materials in unique and unexpected ways. They are also considered a pioneer and leader in the field of sustainable design.
Brooks and Scarpa have received more than 200 major design awards including twenty-nine National AIA Awards, Architect Magazine’s Progressive Architecture and R+D awards, the HIVE 50 Innovator Award, National AIA Collaborative Achievement Award, AIA Los Angeles Chapter Gold Medal, Architect Magazine’s Top 50 Architecture Firms (ranked 2nd, 4th and 9th respectively), AIA California Council Lifetime Achievement Award, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, Record Houses, Record Interiors, Rudy Bruner Prize, six AIA COTE “Top Ten Green Building” Awards and was a finalist for the World Habitat Award, one of ten firms selected worldwide. His work has been exhibited internationally including the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, MOCA Los Angeles, A+D Museum and the Smithsonian Museum. They have been featured in NEWSWEEK and he has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Leonardo Di Caprio. In addition, Interior Design Magazine honored them with their Lifetime Achievement Award. And their firm Brooks + Scarpa was awarded the National and State of California Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects. In 2022 they received the National AIA Gold Medal, the institutes most prestigious honor.
They are currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California and have taught and lectured at the university level for more than two decades. Some of those institutions include Harvard University, UCLA, SCI-arc, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Florida, University of Michigan, University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. They are co-founder’s of the A+D Museum, Los Angeles, Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute and Livable Places, Inc.; a nonprofit development and public policy organization dedicated to building mixed-use housing and to help develop more sustainable and livable communities.
Check out the video below!