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The design of a renovation for the Lane Community College Arts School in Eugene took top honors Thursday at the 2014 American Institute of Architects of Southwestern Oregon design awards dinner.

Eugene-based Rowell Brokaw Architects received an honor award for the arts school project as well as one for a light fixture installation in the lobby at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene. The firm also landed merit awards for the Edwards Community Center and a Churchill High School project, and citation awards for the Eugene Water & Electric Board‘s riverfront master plan, the University of Oregon‘s Zebrafish Core facility and the First on Broadway adaptive reuse project.

PIVOT Architecture, also of Eugene, received a merit award for EWEB’s Roosevelt Operations Center, and citation awards for its Eugene office and the Richardson Sports headquarters in Springfield.

Eugene-based Robertson | Sherwood Architects, SRG Partnership, and Oakland, Calif.-based Pyatok Architects won a citation award for the Lane Community College downtown campus.

The awards event was combined with a public lecture. Carol Coletta, vice president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and a design awards jury member, delivered an address titled “Making Great Cities: Talent + Opportunity + Place.”

The awards ceremony was the first in five years for the AIA Southwestern Oregon chapter, and there was plenty of design excellence to recognize since the previous one, AIA Southwestern Oregon President Scott Clarke told attendees.

Eugene has seen a surge in development, much of it tied to increased enrollment at the University of Oregon, and the creation of vibrant neighborhoods like Whiteaker, he said.

“We have experienced a remarkable fruition of a lot of efforts,” Clarke said. “We have a lot to be proud of.”

A four-member jury of design professionals hailing from outside Southwestern Oregon evaluated each entry. Along with Coletta, the jury included David Tryba, lead design principal at Denver-based Tryba Architects; Laura Hafermann, principal of Seattle-based Salt Studio; and Los Angeles-based architect Dennis McFadden.

“It’s not often that we have any sort of outside perspective on our community,” Clarke said.

Jury members explained their selections during the awards ceremony. Tryba praised the entries.

“They all had that quality of connection and connectivity regardless of program and scale,” he said. “That was there with even the smallest projects and the largest urban designs.”

The arts building project at LCC stood out as a top project for how it addressed this theme, Tryba said.

“We thought of this project as a link to the rest of the campus and the broader community,” he said.

The addition of lights to the Hult Center lobby impressed the jury because of how Rowell Brokaw Architects designed custom fixtures to enhance the space.

“This project signifies how small changes can make huge differences,” Tryba said. “This is a very minimal solution to enormous effect and significant transformation.”