Lecture Series
Presenting the work of outstanding architects from the region
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2024 Design Awards Lecture
Dialogues in Space:
The Work of Wendell Burnette Architects
Wendell Burnette FAIA
Wendell Burnette Architects
Phoenix Arizona
1.5 LU/HSW
Thursday December 12 2023 | 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm |
Violet Crown Cinema | 1606 Alcaldesa Street | Santa Fe New Mexico
Wendell Burnette Architects’ design philosophy is grounded in listening and distilling the very essence of a project to create highly specific architecture that is at once functional and poetic. Our design approach is to listen to all aspects of a particular building program and develop a consensus of approach with client, design team members, and potential contractors. Through the integration of this process, Wendell Burnette Architects delivers architecture that is both uniquely appropriate and timelessly valuable to the client and/or user. Projects include custom residences located locally and nationally, public commissions in our community such as the Palo Verde Library / Maryvale Community Center, the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, and the Scottsdale Teen Center, and Resorts/Spas worldwide including the much acclaimed Amangiri Resort*.
The work of Wendell Burnette Architects has earned numerous honors, including a 1990 Young Architects Award from Progressive Architecture magazine, a 1999 “Emerging Voices Award” from the Architectural League of New York, a 1999 P/A Design Award from Architecture magazine, three “Record House” Awards in 1996, 2000 and 2006 from Architectural Record Magazine, an AIA Western Mountain Region Merit Award for The Field House, and a 2007 National AIA Honor Award and 2009 National AIA/ALA Honor Award for the Palo Verde Library/Maryvale Community Center. Exhibitions in the last decade include “Design Culture Now” at the SMITHSONIAN Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, “SouthwestNET” for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, “Dialogues in Space”, a solo exhibit at the Arizona State University’s former College of Design and “Architecture in the Sonoran Desert: Phoenix – Barcelona” an exhibit and symposium in Barcelona, Spain. Most recently, Burnette received the 2009 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters recognizing an “American architect whose work is characterized by a strong personal direction” which was accompanied by an exhibition of this work in NYC.
Wendell Burnette, FAIA
Educated in the practice of architecture through 34 years of direct experience spanning a wide range of public and private work, Mr. Burnette’s self-taught curriculum includes a three-year period at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. Burnette’s eleven-year association with the studio of William Bruder culminated in a six-year design collaboration on the New Phoenix Central Library as co-designer, project architect, and field architect. He founded the studio of Wendell Burnette Architects in 1996. He is also a Professor of Practice at The Design School at Arizona State University where he has been teaching since 2000.
Burnette has traveled widely in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas to assimilate a world perspective of architecture. In the United States and specifically in the American deserts he has absorbed a unique, regional understanding of place. His work has been presented in over 150 publications worldwide. Burnette’s architecture has received local and national awards, and due to this recognition, continues to be invited as a guest lecturer, teacher and critic at Universities and AIA events across North America.