Why the AIA COTE Top Ten Matters

A Note from the Committee on the Environment

“Design awards reward aesthetics. LEED ratings award performance. The Top Ten program does both.” These are the words of Henry Siegel, FAIA, and we agree. But now that every AIA awards program refers to the Framework for Design Excellence, what is different about the AIA COTE Top Ten Award?

The AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten began as the “Earth Day Top Ten” in 1997. From its inception, the award has had two main purposes:

• to expand the profession’s definition of design excellence to include sustainability; and

• to teach the world, through published case studies, what sustainability looks like in practice

The criteria of the award evolved and expanded as we learned more, eventually becoming the COTE Top Ten Measures. COTE developed resources, collectively referred to as the Top Ten Toolkit, to help support award entrants and to elevate holistic sustainability across the profession. From the beginning, the program has emphasized achievement over intention, and puts equal weight on traditional measures of design quality and performance metrics. Including the 2023 AIA COTE Top Ten winners, the program has elevated 270 exemplars of holistic sustainability. It has become one of the AIA’s most well-known awards programs and remains the highest sustainable design accolade in our profession.

In 2019, the AIA adopted the Top Ten Measures and parts of the Top Ten Toolkit, rebranding them as the Framework for Design Excellence, and has begun integrating the Framework into all AIA awards programs. AIA members may have experienced this roll-out in a range of formats, from being required to submit short narratives for each Framework principle when entering local chapter awards to submitting a series of simple metrics—like projected Energy Use Intensity (EUI) and percent of stormwater managed on-site—when entering national AIA award programs. Just this month, these metrics began to show up on the AIA website, with the AIA Committee on Architecture and Education (CAE) adding a tab to their award winner pages containing these submitted Framework metrics for the first time.

Widespread adoption of the Framework is one indicator of the Top Ten program’s success, and the Framework is raising awareness around many of the basic concepts of sustainability (and their metrics) throughout the membership. However, its adoption has not achieved all the Top Ten program’s goals. Knowledge is one thing; action is another. The Top Ten exists to transform how architects practice, moving us towards a healthy, sustainable, and equitable future for all. Our understanding of the pathway to that goal continues to evolve, and as it does, the AIA COTE Top Ten will continue to map the leading edge of our collective knowledge and elevate those projects that we can all learn from.

So, what is different about the AIA COTE Top Ten Awards compared to every other Framework-based AIA awards program?

• Performance + design. The Top Ten was founded on the idea that good design cannot be separated from sustainable design. As a result, jurors weigh performance and design equally. One of the most important principles for the Top Ten is Design for Integration: how is the project’s big idea driven by sustainability, health, and equity? How does sustainability show up, from site plan to detail?

• Expanded criteria. While it is organized by and aligns with the Framework for Design Excellence, the Top Ten expands awards criteria to include emerging topics, such as total carbon, and robust metrics so jurors can understand the full extent of the project’s approach and what it has accomplished compared to a predevelopment condition. COTE has developed the Super Spreadsheet to standardize units and calculations that can make it easier for submitters to collect data and understand its impacts—which is just as useful as a project tool as it is an awards formality. Because all sustainability is client-, typology-, and site-specific, criteria are also separated into “required” and “encouraged” criteria to enable teams to tell their project’s full story while also standardizing the basic criteria to which all projects are accountable.

• Actual impact, not intentions. AIA COTE Top Ten is the only AIA awards program that has two groups of reviewers. In addition to the awards jury, there is a set of technical reviewers—a team of experts in the field who provide peer review on submitted data, methodology, and project claims to ensure accuracy. They provide the jury with the technical expertise to make a holistic decision. Over the years, the Top Ten has also moved away from predicted data and instead required measured data where it can, so that the reviewers/ jury can assess actual impact, not aspiration. This acknowledges the expanded role design teams play in high-performance projects, including troubleshooting, data-monitoring, client education, and postoccupancy evaluations, and the responsibility we have to share what we learn in the process so we can, as a profession, continuously improve.

The Top Ten is more than an accolade; it is a framework to transform how we practice. The 2024 Top Ten Awards cycle opens in August; does your project have what it takes to be a national model of holistic sustainability? Why not give the AIA COTE Top Ten a try?

Heather Holdridge of Lake|Flato says: “Lake|Flato considers the AIA COTE Top Ten to be the most prestigious award available to our profession because it recognizes both design excellence and sustainability, and that a winning project has seamlessly integrated the two. AIA COTE Top Ten projects also demonstrate that design and building performance enhance client vision.”