Out of Scale

The AIA’s Small Project Practitioners (SPP) Knowledge Community’s Advisory Group  launched the Small Project Awards program in 2005 to provide a formal venue for recognizing small projects completed on small budgets. Over the years, project size grew and the ban on professional photography was lifted, but the resourcefulness, skill, and talent of small project practitioners remained a constant.

This publication covers ten years of the AIA Small Project Awards program. Enough time has passed to meaningfully revisit and showcase previous award winning work, and to provide a record for us to take stock of the evolution of the Small Project Awards program as a whole. Organized into four chapters—Objects and Pavilions, Houses, Details, and Adaptive Reuse/Interiors—this book reveals that small projects have properties, uses, foci, and contexts that are distinct from architecture that operates at larger scales.

This book asks the question, are there unique and defining qualities to small projects? With the contributing authors’ insightful chapter introductions, along with the formatting and sequencing of work within each chapter, there exists a means to compare award-winning projects and arrive at one’s own conclusion. One theme throughout is clear, though, that the smallness of the work is perhaps the biggest advantage for the small project practitioner. For this reason, the Small Project Awards program will continue to celebrate work whose creativity and impact are Out of Scale.