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Framework for design excellence, a primer The AIA’s Framework for Design Excellence supports a clear vision for delivering high performing, equitable, and beautiful buildings. The framework is made up of ten measures that grew from the AIA’s Committee On The Environment (COTE) Top Ten Award, a well-known industry benchmark that has promoted these core values since 1997. It is a resource that can facilitate conversations with clients and communities and set meaningful goals and targets for climate action. As our society faces increasingly complex challenges, from climate change, to social equity, to an emphasis on individual well-being, good architecture provides a primary means to address these issues head on. To give the framework some context, I’ll outline some of the major milestones over the past few years that led up to its recent adoption. In 2017, the COTE Top Ten Award was overhauled to reflect the current state of cutting-edge practice, with an increased emphasis on the metrics behind the design. In 2018, Corey Squire, Helena Zambrano, and I led the development of the COTE Toolkit, along with over 60 volunteers spanning across the institute that provided deep subject matter expertise in all ten measures. The toolkit served as an ‘operating manual’ that demonstrates how to integrate the measures into projects. Concurrently, the AIA issued strong position statements on climate change, and incorporated Canon VI - Obligations to the Environment into our Code of Ethics. At the A’19 conference, the Resolution for Urgent and Sustained Climate Action was put forth to AIA delegates, volunteer chapter leaders from all over the country. Adopted
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by a landslide, the architecture community signaled its desire to choose relevance in the era of climate change. In response, the AIA Board of Directors swiftly adopted the COTE Top Ten Award criteria and recast it as the Framework for Design Excellence last September. The framework has been influenced by these and many other initiatives across the institute. Attention must now turn to integrating the ten measures into every practice, every building, and every city. The framework provides a construct for an open-ended dialogue that facilitates a more deeply integrated and rich design solution. It asks the essential questions that set the project up for success at its earliest stages. It leads the project with a vision instead of a checklist, mandating design teams address nuanced concepts of culture and place. It is accessible to a lay audience, in a language that which they can understand and contribute. These questions not only illuminate opportunities to integrate sustainability, but to further a deeper understanding of our clients, future building inhabitants and communities in which they reside. The framework is an extremely powerful design tool that works in a myriad of ways. It provides flexible guidance without overly prescriptive solutions. Each measure unpacks best practices, project examples, tools, and influential research. It is curated to highlight essential criteria, promote searchability and ease of use. Rather than another detailed report focused on an isolated measure that must work in all conditions, the team developed a holistic resource that summarizes the landscape of best
