AIA Awards and Architecture Lecture

The AIA Fort Worth Design Awards program recognizes outstanding architectural, urban design, and unbuilt projects by architects practicing in the Fort Worth chapter to promote public interest in design excellence. Award announcements will begin at 6 pm, followed by a lecture at 6:30 pm with awards juror John Ronan from Chicago-based architecture firm, John Ronan Architects. This event is free and open to the public.

RSVP to this awards ceremony and lecture here.

About John Ronan and John Ronan Architects

John Ronan, FAIA, is the founding principal of John Ronan Architects, established in Chicago in 1999. He serves as Lead Designer on all projects the firm undertakes and is known for his abstract yet sensuous work exploring materiality and atmosphere.

Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan. 

In 1999, he was a winner in the Townhouse Revisited competition staged by the Graham Foundation, and in 2004, his firm won the prestigious Perth Amboy High School Design Competition—an international, two-stage competition for a 472,000-square-foot high school in New Jersey. In December 2000, he was named to Architectural Record magazine’s Design Vanguard, and in January 2005, he was selected for The Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices program. Ronan has lectured widely, and his work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Art Institute of Chicago and The Architectural League of New York’s Urban Center.

His work has been extensively covered by the international design press. A monograph on his work, Explorations, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. The Poetry Foundation, a publication by the Center for American Architecture & Design at the University of Texas, followed in 2015. In 2022, Out of the Ordinary: The Work of John Ronan Architects was published by Actar.

Ronan currently serves as the John & Jeanne Rowe Endowed Professor in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His interests include drawing, writing, and fly fishing. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters.

John Ronan Architects, founded in 1999, is an internationally recognized design firm based in Chicago, composed of dedicated design professionals committed to producing architecture of the highest quality—marked by conceptual innovation, exploration of materiality, and rigorous attention to detail. The firm maintains a collaborative studio culture with a research-based working method.

Led by John Ronan, the practice pursues an iterative design process that explores and tests a wide range of ideas to find a solution that feels intuitively correct for each project, based on its unique site, program, and context—cultural, historical, economic, and social. Working across diverse scales and project types, the firm’s work exhibits a searching quality that seeks to produce architecture that is both compelling and memorable.

John Ronan Architects is known for its widely published, award-winning projects in Chicago, including the Poetry Foundation, Gary Comer Youth Center, Independence Library and Apartments, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and, most recently, the Chicago Park District Headquarters. The firm’s work spans a broad range of building types and scales and has earned three AIA National Honor Awards for design excellence.

John Ronan Architects has also been recognized internationally, competing as a finalist for the Obama Presidential Center and UCD Future Campus Project in Dublin, and, in 2024, winning the invited competition to design the Fallen Journalists Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.