Cooperwood Senior Living Honored with National Housing Award at AIA24 Awards Gala

Cooperwood Senior Living has won the AIA National Housing Award! We had the pleasure of being honored with this award at the AIA24 Awards Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. last week!

The design of the Cooperwood assisted living complex is a search for a more meaningful and lively home environment. This project did not cost any more than its competitors. The goal was to rethink the institutional typology; the materials were free, light, air, proportion, color, shape, and pattern. The project started as a reconsideration of normal units, where retiring residents would spend large portions of their day and night. The economically limited size units were reshaped to be dynamic and dimensionally open by breaking the normal four-square rooms with spayed exterior walls. The inside and out were connected with large windows strategically located to animate the interior and offer enticing views. The large institutional building was remade into houses. The shape and structure of the building, uniting the room exterior walls and houses, offered the opportunity for a dynamic balance and concurrence of formal strategies. The faceted exterior with sunshades changing in the sunlight helps this new complex feel alive and have both a familiar and unfamiliar presence, which the designers considered an example of uncanny form.

Duvall Decker is overjoyed and filled with gratitude to see this project be recognized on the national stage. We can’t thank AIA enough for acknowledging the impact of this new typology. Congratulations to everyone in our Duvall Decker family for your steadfast dedication to this work and a big thank you to our client for establishing a vision and to our consultants for helping us carry it out.