2025 Design Excellence Award winners

Reimagining Public Space: A Merit Award for Placemaking on Bethesda Avenue

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This blog is part of a series that highlights the winners of the 2025 Design Excellence Awards.

Placemaking is the act of improving a common space to make it welcoming and attractive, so it better serves the needs of the people who use it. It is both a process and an outcome. As a process, it is a collaborative effort to plan, design, and manage public spaces in ways that enhance community health, happiness, and well-being. It relies on active participation from community members to create a shared vision: transforming ordinary spaces into vibrant destinations that strengthen connections between people and their environment.

As an outcome, placemaking results in spaces that foster social interaction, environmental stewardship, economic vitality, and health. … Continue reading

Design Excellence in Bethesda: How The Sophia elevates urban living

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This blog is part of a series that highlights the winners of the 2025 Design Excellence Awards.

Architecture demands an expression in response to different settings.  It is based on an evolving common understanding of the structure of places, subject to reinterpretation by each architect. Architects should value what exists through sensitive and thoughtful designs that are generative and timeless so that all buildings become a point of departure within their urban context for subsequent building designs.

Architectural style should emerge from the adaptation, evolution, and transformation of buildings and landscapes within their regional context. From this foundation, an appropriate design language for a building can be determined. For a residential building, a modern aesthetic can coexist with comfort and elegance … Continue reading

A new standard: Celebrating Strathmore Square’s visionary design

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This blog is part of a series that highlights the winners of the 2025 Design Excellence Awards.

Thoughtful and purposeful design and architecture shape how we live, work, and connect. It influences our sense of belonging within a community and promotes better health, and environmental resiliency by creating neighborhoods and centers that are not only functional but inspiring for generations to come.

All communities strive to create a “sense of place.” When landscape and architectural designs are done right, great places are achieved. Through our design excellence awards, we want to recognize and promote those projects and their teams that make a difference. That’s why the Design Excellence Award program was created in 2015. Since then, we have brought … Continue reading