Date Posted: 09.24.2020
AIA Seattle has selected Walter Schacht FAIA for the 2020 AIA Seattle Gold Medal. The Gold Medal is the highest award that AIA Seattle can bestow on one of its members. It recognizes distinguished lifetime achievement in architecture, including design and professional practice and service to the profession, the community, education and the arts.
Walter has practiced architecture for more than thirty years with a central focus on the public realm. He thinks strategically about the relationships between people, place and process. His clearly planned, carefully detailed civic buildings—including the award-winning Douglass-Truth Branch Library and Peninsula College Maier Hall—reflect a search for meaning inspired by their community, context and culture. Walter’s partnership with architect Cima Malek-Aslani is the foundation of his practice.
Walter works with his colleagues and clients to promote public policies that advance the profession and the community. He has served as AIA Seattle President, on AIA Seattle’s Public Policy Board, on the Board of AIA Washington Council and chaired the state’s Capital Projects Advisory Board. In 2013, Walter was inducted into the AIA College of Fellows for his distinguished body of work and activism. In 2015, he received AIA Seattle’s Community Service Award and AIA Washington Council’s Jennie Sue Brown Award for service to the profession.
The AIA Seattle Gold Medal was first introduced in 1984. Since then, its honorees have had a substantial influence in shaping and advancing architecture in the Pacific Northwest as it grows in national and international importance.
