Highlighting the Impact of Women in Architecture
Kate Simonen, CLF’s founder and current board chair, is the recipient of a major award from Architectural Record. Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Awards, the only program of its kind in the U.S., was started to shine a spotlight on the increasingly significant contributions of women design leaders, across generations and specialties. The annual awards ceremony not only acknowledges outstanding achievement but serves as inspiration to young architects moving up in the field.
Award Description from Architectural Record:
Kate Simonen | Founding director, Carbon Leadership Forum
Based in Seattle, Simonen is founding director of the Carbon Leadership Forum and a professor of architecture at the University of Washington. Licensed as an architect and structural engineer, she connects professional experience in high-performance building design and technical expertise in life-cycle assessment to spur collective action toward bringing net embodied carbon to zero through cutting-edge research, cross-sector collaboration, and the incubation of new approaches. Under her management, the Carbon Leadership Forum has grown, becoming globally recognized for advancing embodied-carbon data, methods, and policy, as well as for inspiring and empowering collective action to achieve those ends.
In 2024, joining more than 50 design leaders who have been recognized since the program’s launch, the five newest honorees are:
- Angela Brooks
- Mimi Hoang
- Toni L. Griffin
- Susan Jones
- Kate Simonen
This year’s awards jury comprised past awardees Stella Betts e Anne Marie Duvall Decker; Yasemin Kologlu, principal at SOM; Chandra Robinson, principal at Lever Architecture; and Mark Gardner, principal at Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects.