Sara Johnson

Held at Radio City Music Hall on Thursday evening, the first keynote session at the AIA Conference on Architecture 2018 featured the awards presentations for the AIA's Architecture Firm Award and Whitney M. Young Jr. Award, as well as appearances by David Adjaye, Hon. FAIA, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, and Marc Morial.

Inclusion was explicitly mentioned by several of the speakers and awards recipients. "Nowhere is it more important to have an inclusive design process than in our tribal communities," said Tamara Eagle Bull, FAIA, the winner of the 2018 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. Morial, the president and CEO of the National Urban League, outlined three words that he said he hoped would "guide our thinking": inclusion, infrastructure, and intersectionality.

In accepting the 2018 Architecture Firm Award, design principals Julie Snow, FAIA, and Matt Kreilich, FAIA, brought out their Snow Kreilich Architects team onto the Radio City stage. "It [the award] recognizes the work of our entire studio," Snow said.

In the headline presentation, Adjaye offered a series of slides presenting a range of his projects, from the Francis A. Gregory Neighborhood Library and National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to the Sugar Hill affordable housing project and the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York.