Frazier Associates Receives Firm Award from AIA Virginia

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Virginia presented Frazier Associates with the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Architecture Firm Award at its annual Honors and Awards gala, Visions for Architecture, in Richmond on November 3, 2017. The Firm Award is the highest honor bestowed on a firm in the Commonwealth by the AIA Virginia and has been presented to only 15 firms in the past 30 years. Firms must have produced distinguished architecture for at least ten years, and have demonstrated a consistency of philosophy and quality of design, professional leadership, wide breadth of work, and relationship of built work to purpose, environment, user and physical context.

In his award notification letter, AIA Virginia Executive Vice President, R. Corey Clayborne, AIA, emphasized Frazier Associates’ extensive work in architecture, preservation and planning. He stated, “Frazier Associates has had a tremendous impact on the state,” noting that the firm’s work “to boost a sense of place in areas that often go unnoticed is particularly extraordinary.”

Established in 1986, Frazier Associates is a full-service architecture and planning firm located in Staunton, Virginia. The firm’s wide-ranging work in architecture, historic preservation, adaptive reuse, revitalization, contextual design, and related community planning and design totals nearly 3,000 projects in more than 100 Virginia communities and 20 states. Projects range from historic rehabilitation of large commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings, to façade rehabilitations of hundreds of historic commercial buildings as well as new construction and residential design. Related planning projects include more than 50 sets of design guidelines and pattern books for historic downtowns, neighborhoods, corridors, and rural villages throughout the southeast. Wayfinding is also an outgrowth of the firm’s focus on community design, with sign systems designed for more than 40 localities and institutions nationwide.

The AIA Honor Awards recognize the best efforts of Virginians who, by profession or avocation, have made creating, preserving, and enhancing Virginia’s communities an important life commitment. Recipients are nominated by AIA members and their peers.

Hugh C. Miller, FAIA in his nomination statement noted, “For over thirty years, Frazier Associates has had a consistent philosophy and mission of preservation and sustainability. The scope of their public and private architecture in dozens of Virginia communities consistently demonstrates the staying power of good design in the rejuvenation of historic buildings and creation of new buildings. More than 100 awards, and numerous publications are lasting testament to the firm’s achievements.”

Founders and principals of Frazier Associates, William T. Frazier, FAICP and Kathleen O Frazier, AIA accepted the award at the banquet. Kathleen Frazier expressed appreciation to the society and to its clients, “The firm remains committed to the benefits and value that historic preservation brings to communities. Since its founding, Frazier Associates has fostered a historic preservation ethic as a civic responsibility to preserve and build upon the best of a community’s past to enhance community pride and sense of place.”