2017 Best of Design Award for Civic – Cultural: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art

Architect: SO-IL with Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
Location: Davis, California

Defining the museum as a landscape of cultivation, the design of the recently established Manetti Shrem Museum at the University of California, Davis, captures the Central Valley’s spirit of optimism, imagination, and invention. “Cultivation” has a divergent etymology, on one hand rural, on the other, urban-bourgeois. The overarching “Grand Canopy” seeks to embrace both contexts, extending a rolling form patchworked with aluminum beams over both site and building. An environmental silhouette, the design provides identity and awareness to multiple constituencies.

“The project makes me optimistic for architecture in the U.S. —intelligent and rigorous architecture that is also delightful and humanist at the same time.  I love how the building connects an intimate experience to the scale of the landscape around it.” —Eric Bunge, principal, nARCHITECTS (juror)

Contractor:
Whiting-Turner

Structural Engineer:
Rutherford & Chekene

Mechanical Engineer:
WSP

Lighting:
Fisher Marantz Stone

Canopy Engineer:
Front

Honorable Mention

Name: Chrysalis
Designer: MARC FORNES / THEVERYMANY
Place: Columbia, Maryland

Chrysalis is an amphitheater, but it is first a pavilion in a park, a tree house, and a placemaking public artwork, ready to be activated at any moment. Here, temporary occupations are staged under a series of cascading arches that vary in size and function: a structural system that gives form to play.