By day, the rusting metal relief that wraps around a small garden retaining wall on the South Side Slopes isn't very noticeable to drivers traveling up or down the hillside.

But at night, this modest project comes alive as a backlit gateway, a beacon welcoming visitors and residents to that part of the Slopes. The transformation of a vacant lot at Brosville Street and Monastery Avenue illustrates how small improvements at key intersections can make a big difference in a community.

The project, by Peter Kreuthmeier of Loysen + Kreuthmeier Architects, was one of 17 honored at this year's American Institute of Architects Design Awards, held Oct. 22 at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. The center's designer, San Francisco-based Allison Williams, led the jury of Bay Area architects, which praised the Monastery-Brosville garden wall as an "admirable urban strategy that brings an everyday background element of streetscape into unique neighborhood landmark status."

That streetscape element comes into play in the design of the perforated scrim, digitally cut by Technique Architectural Products to represent maps of the Slopes, complete with buildings, parks, public steps and winding streets.

Loysen + Kreuthmeier also picked up an award for its North Side library on Federal Street, which the jury called "a robust civic presence in keeping with the Carnegie tradition."

The Hill District library by Pfaffmann + Associates also won an award; the jury found it "quite civic in the way it engages the street and establishes the most honorific space, the reading room, as a prow anchoring the corner in this historic neighborhood."

(Meanwhile, in Chicago last weekend, Rob Pfaffmann accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award from that AIA chapter on behalf of his great-great-grandfather, Daniel Burnham, for his work with Edward Bennett on the 1909 Plan of Chicago.)

Former Pittsburgher Rebecca Flora, now senior vice president of the United States Green Building Council, was honored with AIA Pittsburgh's Gold Medal for her leadership and advocacy on behalf of green design.

The chapter's Timeless Award went to Schenley High School, recognizing its many decades of service and its "well-proportioned exterior facades, with extraordinary presence and fantastic potential for adaptive reuse."

While modernism carried the evening with the jury, the People's Choice Award, not surprisingly, went to a throwback, the Second Empire-style West Virginia University Alumni Center by IKM Inc.

For more award-winning projects and photographs of all of them, visit pittsburghsfavoritearchitecture.com.

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