Institute Honors Museum for Excellence in Interior Architecture

The Last Column stands over Foundation Hall as visitors walk by it. The illuminated slurry wall stands in the background.
The museum has been honored for excellence in interior architecture. (Photo: Amy Dreher)

The American Institute of Architects, or AIA, has selected the 9/11 Memorial Museum as a 2015 recipient of its Institute Honor Awards for excellence in interior architecture.

The architectural firm Davis Brody Bond designed the below-plaza museum.

On its website, the AIA notes, “The visitor experience of the 9/11 Memorial Museum is deeply intertwined with the cultural memory and emotional reaction” to 9/11.

“The footprints and the foundations of the original towers create a deeply felt, intuitive connection to the events, and the vastness of the spaces provides a sense of the scale of the attack,” the institute noted on its site.

The museum was among 23 recipients of the award from about 500 submissions and will be honored at the AIA 2015 National Convention and Design Exposition in Atlanta. The winners in each category – architecture, interior architecture and urban design – were chosen by a jury of institute representatives and architects.

One of the jury comments reads, “The project is so very complex: the artifacts, the sequencing, the scale, plus the enormous responsibility of creating an experience in this place with such importance to our country.”

By Jordan Friedman, 9/11 Memorial Research and Digital Projects Associate

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