New York architect Steven Holl has won the 2012 AIA Gold Medal. A tenured professor at Columbia University, Holl’s eponymous firm, Steven Holl Architects, has completed projects around the work including two recent projects in China; Linked Hybrid in Beijing, a self-contained community, and the Vanke Center in Shenzhen, described as a ‘horizontal skyscraper’.

Holl’s other projects include the Nelson Atkins Museum Block Building in Kansas City, Mo., MIT’s Simmons Hall in Cambridge, Mass.; the Knut Hamson Center in Norway; NYU’s Department of Philosophy in NY; and Pratt Institute’s Higgins Hall Addition, also in New York. Holl is the 68th Gold Medalist. He joins the ranks of such visionaries as Thomas Jefferson (1993), Frank Lloyd Wright (1949), Louis Sullivan (1944), LeCorbusier (1961), Louis Kahn (1971), I.M. Pei (1979), Santiago Calatrava (2005), Glenn Murcutt (2009, and Fumihiko Maki (2011)).