The Architect’s Newspaper (AN)’s inaugural 2013 Best of Design Awards featured six categories. Since then, it’s grown to 26 exciting categories. As in years past, jury members (Erik Verboon, Claire Weisz, Karen Stonely, Christopher Leong, Adrianne Weremchuk, and AN’s Matt Shaw) were picked for their expertise and high regard in the design community. They based their judgments on evidence of innovation, creative use of new technology, sustainability, strength of presentation, and, most importantly, great design. We want to thank everyone for their continued support and eagerness to submit their work to the Best of Design Awards. We are already looking forward to growing next year’s coverage for you.

2016 Best of Design Award for Adaptive Reuse: National Sawdust by Bureau V

Architect: Bureau V Location: Brooklyn, NY

At its core, National Sawdust is a retooling of the 18th-century chamber hall model as an incubator for new music. Described by The New York Times as “the city’s most vital new-music hall,” its design is characterized by the insertion of a highly articulated crystalline form into the rough brick envelope of a former sawdust factory. The design of this state-of-the-art performance and recording space allows the eponymous nonprofit to achieve its mission of supporting new musicians and composers on their way to viable and sustainable careers. In addition to the chamber hall, the project includes a two-story restaurant and lobby-bar.

Honorable Mention, Adaptive Reuse: 21c Museum Hotel Oklahoma City

Architect: Deborah Berke Partners Location: Oklahoma City, OK

A former Model T production plant built by Albert Kahn was adapted into a mixed-use hotel and contemporary art museum. Thoughtfully preserving the building’s industrial heritage, large open floorplates and new glass block light wells bring natural illumination into the core of the building, while 14-foot-wide hallways double as galleries.

Honorable Mention, Adaptive Reuse: Pennovation Center

Architect: Hollwich Kushner Location: Philadelphia, PA

A 20^th century paint factory turned 21^st century idea factory is the centerpiece of a new, 23-acre campus at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to entrepreneurship and innovation. While most of the building is occupied by state-of-the-art labs and efficient co-working areas, key social spaces encourage the open exchange of ideas.

Suburban folk mark the change of seasons with spring peepers, the sound of leaf blowers, and first frosts. City dwellers rely on other environmental cures: pumpkin spice lattes, heat season, and festive public art installations. Last week, the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership Business Improvement District (BID) and the Van Alen Institute welcomed crowds to SOFTlab's Nova, the 2015 winner of the Flatiron Public Plaza Holiday Design Competition. Perched inside North Flatiron Public Plaza at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street, Nova invites passersby into a kaleidoscopic interior to view area landmarks—the Empire State Building, the Flatiron, and the Met Life Tower—on its mirrored surfaces and through its many exposures. When activated by sound, LEDs pulse to intensify the psychedelic visuals. The design has definite antecedents in SOFTlab's pavilion at this year's SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. Here too, the firm partnered with 3M to create a multicolored neon canopy that showcased the company's products. Van Alen and the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership invited New York–based architecture and design firms Bureau V, Method Design, Sage and Coombe, Studio KCA, and SOFTlab to submit proposals for the competition. Competition jurors included Van Alen and the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership directors and board members; Michael Bierut, partner, Pentagram; Aleksey Lukyanov, partner, Situ Studio; and Wendy Feuer, NYC Department of Transportation's Assistant Commissioner of Design + Art + Wayfinding. "The installation illustrates how interactive public art can change the perception of an environment thereby allowing people to experience it in a new way," Feuer explained in a statement. "We count on organizations like the Partnership to commission these exciting installations making NYC streets ever more inviting." This is the holiday design competition's second year. Last year, INABA won the competition with their installation, New York Light. See the gallery below for more images of Nova.  

Brooklyn designers Bureau V have completed National Sawdust, an experimental performance venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that will be home to the Original Music Workshop (OMW). The name of the venue comes from the existing building’s history as a sawmill. OMW is a nonprofit led by composer Paola Prestini, whose advisory board includes heavy-hitters such as James Murphy, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Vega, and Philip Glass. The 3,000-square-foot space in the heart of Williamsburg at North 6th Street and Wythe Avenue was a collaboration between Bureau V and Arup. It was originally conceived back in 2012 with an estimated opening of 2013. In 2014, it was still unfinished, and a Kickstarter campaign raised over $100,000. Now the project is slated for an opening in October. The design is a mix of a traditional European theater and a black-box space, combining the “crafted beauty of the former” with the “experimental programming and roughness of the latter.” The particular history of the site will add another layer of spatial interest to the building, as its industrial past is conflated with a high-tech present. The result is a sublime collision of new and old: technology and ruin, progress and history, refinement and grit. The acoustics are state-of-the-art and were developed with Arup. For more details on the design, see AN's original 2012 coverage.

There has been so much talk in recent years over the confluence of fashion and architecture, we won't attempt to add to the "discourse" accept to note that Fashion Week is ending today and with it a number of cool and interesting installations around town. One of particular note was created by our friends at Bureau V—two Asymptote alums and a former DSRer—who have now made their third installation for designer Mary Ping and her Slow and Steady Wins the Race brand. We're not exactly sure what's going on here, as one of the principals sent over this nice photo in reference to a separate email, but Style.com puts it thusly: "[It] uses the idea of the still life to, as Ping puts it, 'react to the temporality of the pop-up, and go back to an older tradition of talking about objects.'" If you hurry, you can still catch the installation and the objects thereon—some designed by Ping—some merely selected by her, through tomorrow at Saatchi & Saatchi's ground floor events space at 275 Hudson Street.