Since 2006, the city annually recognizes architecture and design projects that function less as bravura aesthetic statements than as nodes of community life. Projects rooted in a sense of place, people, history.
🏢 Building and Environment category: UNLV’s Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine, at 625 Shadow Lane. This 130,000-square-foot building was envisioned as the anchor of an eventual 9-acre academic medicine campus. And it contains “community life spaces” like a coffee shop and a forum, “the heart of the building,” according to designers TSK Architects, where lectures and presentations will take place.
Historic Preservation and Adaptive Reuse category: Mahoney’s Retail Center, 608 S. Maryland Parkway. This selection is where the community orientation of the awards becomes more apparent, as it rewards a developer — the Dapper Building Company — for not tearing down a building, but rehabbing it to maintain the street’s character.
Ardy de Rocio's mural at the East Las Vegas Community Center. (City of Las Vegas)
🎨 Public Art category: “Our Collective Strength Has No Boundaries,” a new mural by Ardy del Rocio on the outside of the East Las Vegas Community Center, 250 N. Eastern Ave.
Public Project category: Historic Westside Legacy Park, 1600 Mount Mariah Drive. “Park” hardly seems adequate to describe this facility, which, in addition to standard park amenities, has an interpretive history walk and plaques honoring important West Las Vegas figures.
