Four MATT Projects Win National American Architecture Awards

The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Studies are celebrating the 28^th year of their annual American Architectural Awards. The American Architectural Awards are one of the nation’s highest and most prestigious distinguished building awards program that honors new and cutting-edge design in the United States. This year, the organization received a record number of project submittals; from a short list of 450 projects, a distinguished jury selected 150 projects to receive awards in 2023. From that selection, four MATT projects were chosen and awarded American Architecture Awards for 2023, including Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Audrey Irmas Pavilion, The Herald Examiner Building, Landmark Los Angeles, and One Westside.

Public Space: Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Audrey Irmas Pavilion

The Audrey Irmas Pavilion is a new addition to the Wilshire Boulevard Temple’s Glazer Family Campus that serves as a multi-purpose event space for both the congregation and the surrounding city. The pavilion is a gathering place, forging new connections with the existing campus activities and inviting the urban realm into the new civic anchor. The building was designed to be iconic enough to be recognized as a new civic entity, but subtle enough to complement the iconicism of the existing temple.

You can read more about the project here.

Restoration/Renovation: The Herald Examiner Building

Designed by Julia Morgan for William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper headquarters, the Herald Examiner Building is an architectural icon designated as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 1977.

The Herald Examiner closed in 1989, and the building on the corner of Broadway and 11th Street sat vacant for many years. Purchased in 2015, The Georgetown Company partnered with the Hearst Corporation to redevelop the iconic Herald Examiner Building into an approximately 115,000 square foot creative office space and retail project. The nationally recognized historical building, originally built in 1914 in downtown Los Angeles, has been transformed into a new state-of-the-art facility for Arizona State University, with restaurant and retail space on the ground level, and a large auditorium for events. Preserving the building’s historic nature, while paying homage to its unique design was key in this adaptive reuse and renovation project.

You can read more about the project here.

Honorable Mention: Landmark Los Angeles

The Landmark Apartments is the first residential high-rise built west of the 405 Freeway in more than 40 years. The modern 34-story tower features 376 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments–including 16 affordable units–as well as a 40,000 sf landscaped park at the corner of Wilshire and Stoner Avenue.  The new shimmering glass-and-steel structure rises 349 feet in height with floor-to-ceiling windows; horizontal balcony planes and glass guardrails are intersected by vertical elements to a rooftop cornice.

Amenities include a Jr. Olympic size pool, a 2,500 sf state-of-the-art fitness center with an outdoor yoga deck, a lobby, and an alfresco lounge with fire pits and an on-site café.

Read more about the project here.

Commercial: One Westside

One Westside represents the unprecedented adaptive reuse of Los Angeles’ Westside Pavilion from iconic shopping mall to a 584,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art, Class-A creative office campus, now home to Google. The building’s completely transparent façade is made of floor-to-ceiling glass and architectural concrete and completely changes the way the building engages with the surrounding neighborhood. The building was designed by Gensler and developed by Hudson Pacific Properties, a proven leader in adaptive reuse projects.

You can read more about the project here.

The Awards Gala Dinner Ceremony honoring the winners will be hosted on December 13^th at The Arts Club of Chicago. Congratulations to the building teams of these four incredible projects!