design excellence

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

Deciding the year’s most excellent designs

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All of us at Montgomery Planning are excited to once again celebrate the best architecture, landscape, and/or urban designs in Montgomery County this fall. The 2025 Design Excellence Awards presentation on Thursday, October 16, 2025, will be held in conjunction with the AIA Potomac Chapter’s Celebrate Design event in Bethesda at the Marriott International Hotels Headquarters (a 2023 Design Excellence Merit winner).

One award will be the newly named Gwen Marcus Wright Design Excellence Award in Architectural, Urban Design, and Landscape design. The second award, Exceptional Housing, will honor multi-family residential projects built in the county over the past ten years. Award submissions are being accepted through Monday evening, July 21, 2025.

For each Design Excellence Awards celebration, Montgomery … Continue reading

Design excellence helps Montgomery County thrive

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The physical design of our neighborhoods and centers within Montgomery County will help guide the quality and shared use of our communities for generations.  When done right, architecture and landscape define these places in a way that fosters their use, their beauty, and their overall prosperity. When incorrectly done, formless architecture that caters to the automobile and is self-referential can be socially isolating and environmentally and economically draining to the entire county.

One of the primary tenants of the new Thrive Montgomery 2050 General Plan is the importance of arts, culture, and design within Complete Communities that support all facets of our daily lives. It is through design that the best aspects of our society and the most positive … Continue reading

Design Makes a Difference: Artspace – Silver Spring

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This is the second in a series of Third Place blogs taking a closer look at the winners of Montgomery Planning’s 2023 Design Excellence Awards.

Many of the concepts described in Montgomery County’s updated General Plan – Thrive Montgomery 2050 – were created to help support the belief that our physical environment has a direct impact on our chances for happy, prosperous lives. It proposes that within the county, well-designed cities, towns, neighborhoods, and public places are necessary to create complete communities where people and businesses can thrive and prosper.

Thrive 2050 builds on our past successes and proposes modifications to prevailing development patterns of the past 60 years, which focused more on building dispersed, isolated housing far … Continue reading

Design Makes a Difference: The Wilson and The Elm

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This is the first in a series of Third Place blogs taking a closer look at the winners of Montgomery Planning’s 2023 Design Excellence Awards.

The best urban places in our region are those that are compact, pedestrian friendly, mixed-use, and supported by transit. The transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems help to maximize access and mobility while reducing dependence on the automobile. In these places, and in the best neighborhoods in our region, architecture and landscape design defines streets and public spaces as places of shared use. These walkable and visually interesting neighborhoods linked to our natural corridors, parks and preserves are accomplishing many of the goals of Montgomery County’s new General Plan, Thrive Montgomery 2050, and its … Continue reading

2021 Design Excellence Awards Jury Announced

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In our most recent blog post “2021 Design Excellence – It’s Time to Celebrate!” we wrote about how excellent architectural design not only supports a great public realm, but that it also has the power to attract and inspire people in a way that can sustain our environmental, social and economic vitality well into the future. Architecture, urban, or landscape design at all scales of development has the power to make our world resilient, equitable and better. In Montgomery County, we celebrate architecture and landscape that make the mundane more interesting and creates and improves streetscapes and spaces that enhance human interaction.

Beginning June 21, the Montgomery County Planning Department opened our webpage to accept submissions for the … Continue reading

2021 Design Excellence – It’s Time to Celebrate!

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The creation of complete communities (a primary tenet of our new Thrive General Plan proposal) within our urban, suburban, and rural centers can only be achieved through quality, sustainable architectural and urban design that supports a strong and vibrant public realm.  Buildings frame and activate streets and parks, and their symbiotic relationship supports community building. Through quality design we can start to protect our health, safety, and welfare in a way that addresses the challenges of increasingly extreme climate conditions and social inequity. Excellent architectural design can not only support a great public realm, but it also has the power to attract and inspire all people.  Excellent architectural, urban, or landscape design, at all scales of development, has the … Continue reading

The Deciders of the Design Excellence Winners

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An independent panel of five experts chose the winners of the 2019 Design Excellence Awards competition

For the fourth time, the Design Excellence Awards will celebrate the best of the best in design throughout Montgomery County. Selections of the 2019 winners were made in July by an independent jury of highly skilled, nationally recognized design professionals from across various creative fields.

This year’s five judges come from all different facets of design and have worked on notable projects across our region, from the Wharf in Southwest DC to new hotel and office towers in downtown Bethesda. The jurors were selected by Montgomery Planning, but made their decisions independently of the agency.

This year’s Design Excellence winners will be … Continue reading