Edward Kirkbride Award
The
Edward Kirkbride Award is bestowed upon a project that exhibits exceptional strength in each of the judging criteria.
2023 Regional Design Awards
Kirkbride Award
Pen Y Bryn Upper School Building
Sandy Spring Friends School | Sandy Spring, MD
Stantec Architecture Inc.
Sandy Spring Friends School, founded in 1961, offers a deep and rigorous academic curriculum rooted in universal Quaker principles and a diverse, international student body that reflects today’s global community. Culturally, the school is rooted in the idea that collaboration engenders achievement, which can be traced to its Quaker heritage.
Project of Distinction
Benjamin Banneker Academic High School
District of Columbia Public Schools | Washington, DC
Perkins Eastman

Benjamin Banneker Academic High School is the highest-performing public school in DC. Its mission is to provide its predominantly African-American and Latinx students with a pathway to academic and life-long success. As testament, year after year 100% of its students graduate high school and 100% are accepted to a college or university. As these students are often the first in their families to be able to pursue a college education, this project most prominently promotes equity through its supportive, healthy, and culture-rich environment that will have a sustained impact on a future generation of diverse environmental stewards and leaders.
Project of Distinction
Cristo Rey Philadelphia High School
School District of Philadelphia | Philadelphia, PA
Blackney Hayes Architects

In 2016, Cristo Rey Philadelphia purchased a 7-acre site, located at 17th and Allegheny Avenue, that included a 5-story, 55,000sf heavy timber and masonry warehouse building. Cristo Rey Philadelphia chose to rehabilitate the warehouse as part of the development of their new high school campus. This new high school includes the renovation of the historic warehouse building and a new 48,000sf addition for school program spaces to accommodate 600 students. The image below shows the exterior plaza and garden that becomes a buffer between the parking lot and the school and is a space for dining, outdoor instruction, and informal gathering. It allows the school to expand its learning environment to the outdoors and creates a secure and private space, an amenity, which students growing up in the city rarely experience.
Project of Distinction
Rock Creek School
Fredrick County Public Schools | Walkersville, MD
Becker Morgan Group, Inc.

Rock Creek School provides individualized special education programs for Frederick County students with severe intellectual, physical, emotional, hearing, visual and learning disabilities.
The Rock Creek community is more of a family than a school. Staff and Administrators form close relationships with school families and together they nurture and develop the academic, physical, social and emotional growth of the Rock Creek children.
Planning efforts for the replacement school were centered around meeting the unique needs of the Rock Creek family. The endgame was to provide an affordable, easily maintained, sustainable facility equal to other new schools in the district: A place that students are proud to attend and share with the community.
Past Winners »