At age 90, Beverly Willis will receive the Engineering News-Record's Legacy Award for her decades-long career as an architect and fierce advocate for women in the field. Considered a lifetime achievement award, the prestigious regional award honors individuals for their lifetimes services to the AEC industry.

Throughout Willis' career, she has helped shape the profession through her professional as well as social and civic contributions. Beginning her career in the 1950s, she's logged more than 800 buildings in her portfolio, her most notable works including the Manhattan Village Academy in New York, the San Francisco Ballet Building, and the Yerba Buena Gardens.

In the early 1970s, her firm was one of the first to develop and utilize computer software for development planning and architectural use. She is among a handful of architects to spark the historic preservation movement and is considered a pioneer of adaptive reuse construction, which was unheard of at the time.

Adding to the list of her steadily made contributions, Willis co-founded the National Building Museum, has served as a US delegate to the United Nations, started the cross-disciplinary think-tank ARI, and was the first female president at the AIA. 

A long-time advocate for women's inclusion, Willis has dedicated herself in recent years to changing the culture for women in the building industry. In 2002, she founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, an archive aimed at shining a light on women architects who were left out of the history books. 

"When I looked around at the age of 75, I noticed that there were no women in the architectural and engineering history books," has said Willis. "My foundation was a way of changing that. We are now in a transitional period of great cultural change, and although we have begun to make strides, there is still plenty of work to be done.”

In addition to receiving ENR New York’s Legacy Award, Willis has also received dozens of other honors, including a number of AIA Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the AIA California, and an Award of Exceptional Distinction from the Governor of California for her innovative work on the Union Street Stores in San Francisco, which historians credit with advancing the modern concept of adaptive reuse.