Award | AIA Austin Design Awards

MRA received two awards at the AIA Austin Design Awards Celebration: a Design Award for W Dock and an Award of Merit for Hill Country House. Perched in the shallow waters of Lake Austin, W Dock is a light, economical structure that seeks to answer the question: what is the minimum number of elements needed to create a boat dock that is both structurally and aesthetically elegant? Commented juror Roberto de Leon, FAIA: “The W Dock was really quite a beautiful, elegantly executed project. In its simplicity and materiality, it takes a rather banal program and really elevates it to something else. It’s a dock, it’s a space to be on, it’s a canopy, it’s also this really iconic image.”

The Hill Country House also received a sustainability commendation. Conceived as a prototype for a sustainable rural community, the project serves as a beacon to show what could be: a self-sustaining home in a rural setting, virtually independent of municipal water and energy. An 8-kiloWatt solar array supplies 61% of annual energy usage; heating and cooling is made possible by a 5-ton geothermal system; and a 30,000-gallon rainwater collection system meets all of the owner’s annual water needs. Said juror Claudia Harari: “It has an important sustainability component with the photovoltaic cells, rain collection for reuse, and generating heat via geothermal energy. It’s a very complete project that spans all the aesthetic aspects of integration with the landscape, abstraction of the landscape, interpretation of rural architecture, and sustainability.”