Welcome to the website of the Potomac Valley Architecture Foundation. We are dedicated to educating the public about architecture and its impact on the built environment, educating architects and students about architecture, and assuring a more sustainable future for all in the Potomac Valley Region.We are pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural AIA Potomac Valley/Maryland Life magazine Residential Design Awards program. To see the winners, CLICK HERE!
"We have long known of the power of architecture to elevate and enrich the human experience..."
John P. Eberhard, FAIA
Mission Statement:
The mission of the Potomac Valley Architecture Foundation is:
a) To work with K-12 schools and the general public to help develop an understanding of the power of architecture to elevate and enrich the human experience;
b) To educate the general public about the importance of livable communities and sustainable architecture to improve the health, safety and welfare of the public;
c) To provide scholarship money to talented and needy students of architecture at the collegiate level; and,
d) To educate architects, both professional and intern, about how to better deliver safe, sustainable and beautiful buildings and communities to the public;
e) To provide public services to the disabled citizens and veterans within our area, and provide architects and others the opportunity to provide their expertise to those citizens.
The Foundation is supported by the AIA Potomac Valley Chapter in College Park, Maryland. To visit their website, click on any of the pictures above (former winners of the AIA*PV Design Awards Competition).
Architecture is thankless because people do not have a vocabulary for responding to it. We can applaud the chef because we enjoy the meal, but we don't know how to articulate feelings about the built environment around us. Words fail, and most of us do not have the poet's gift for metaphor to capture those feelings.
In the absence of this vocabulary, we turn to professional awards and accolades but this is not the ultimate measure of success. Successful architecture is engraved in the smiles, the pleasure, the often unconscious delight that people take in their environment.
It is overwhelming to realize that everything around us is designed. In the midst of that overload, we filter our responses to all but the most extreme, be it love or hate. We have edited out the ordinary wonder and amazement of a well-designed place.
Today architecture is more important than ever before because design has become more important than ever before.
Design provides differentiation, design creates value, design provides meaning. The architect is the storyteller. His nouns and verbs are arches, doorways, surfaces and windows; her prose is the lyric of the lighting, the expanse of an atrium and comfort of an intimate corner.
The story is not in the telling, it is in the hearing, and as architects, we need to remember to whom our craft is in service to, and how profoundly and often invisible that craft impacts our lives."
-AIA Florida and the Florida Foundation for Architecture