The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced its two top honors for 2020. 

The AIA Board of Directors announced today that architect Marlon Blackwell will receive the 2020 Gold Medal citation, which honors "an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture," according to an official statement. According to the AIA, Blackwell is being recognized specifically for a "body of transcendent work" in Northwest Arkansas. Blackwell is the founder of Marlon Blackwell Architects, the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture at the E. Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in Arkansas, and was recently named as one of the "30 Most Admired Educators" by DesignIntelligence. 

Thom Mayne, 2013 AIA Gold Medal recipient and founder of Morphosis, writing in support of Blackwell’s nomination says, "As a practicing architect and educator myself, I have become aware of the growing estrangement between the world of practitioner and that of the academy." Mayne added, "Marlon teaches, as do I, because of the great sense of responsibility to add a measure of reality to the education of architectural students while also supporting the theoretical or less pragmatic aspects of their education.”

In addition, the AIA Board of Directors, in conjunction with the Strategic Council of the AIA, is honoring Architecture Research Office (ARO) with the 2020 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The award represents the "highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture practice" and is given to "a firm that has consistently produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years," according to a press release. 

The practice, founded in 1993 principals Stephen Cassell, Kim Yao, and Adam Yarinsky, is based in New York City and has a reputation for producing work that is "simultaneously humanistic and analytical," according to the AIA. 

In a statement supporting ARO's nomination for the award, Harvard University Graduate School of Design Dean Sarah Whiting wrote, "ARO's work, ranging from their extensive work on additional American university campuses to the cultural work they are doing for the Rothko Chapel and have done for the Judd Foundation to the research work that they've done on urban climate issues as well as material fabrication, has been consistently tight in its articulation (no excess), but it emerges from a keen understanding of each project and a keen appreciation for each deployed material rather than coming from a school of minimalism."

Previously, ARO has been awarded six AIA Honor Awards, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Architecture, and the Academy Award for Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2018 AIA New York's firm of the year prize.