AIA Awards and Architecture Lecture 2026

The AIA Fort Worth Design Awards program recognizes outstanding architectural, urban design, and unbuilt projects by architects practicing in the Fort Worth chapter to promote public interest in design excellence. 

Award announcements will begin at 6 pm, followed by a lecture at 6:30 pm with awards juror Reza Azard, founder of Studio - Projectiles, a Paris-based multidisciplinary architecture and scenography studio. This event is free and open to the public.

The lecture on Histories of Walls explores the wall as one of architecture’s most fundamental and enduring elements—not simply as a means of enclosure or separation, but as an architectural condition that has shaped cities, carried memory, produced meaning, and established relationships across cultures and time. Structured around four themes—The Wall and the City, The Wall and Memory, The Wall and the Sign, and The Wall and Relation—the lecture moves between vernacular and historical precedents, works by architects such as Peter Zumthor, and projects developed by Projectiles with Reza Azard as principal designer.

From Persian enclosed gardens and the urban structure of Isfahan to contemporary museums, exhibition spaces, and projects in AlUla, the lecture examines how walls define territories, preserve traces of history, communicate cultural meaning, and mediate relationships between people, architecture, and place. Rather than understanding the wall as a static boundary, Histories of Walls considers it as an active architectural device through which space and relationships are constructed.