Carol Ross Barney is the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal winner for 2023, becoming the first Chicago-based architect to take home the organization’s top honor since Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Barney’s portfolio includes Chicago’s Riverwalk, which has become one of the city’s top attractions, and a U-shaped federal building in Oklahoma City that replaced the Afred P. Murrah Federal Building that was destroyed in a terrorist bombing in 1995.
The award, one of the industry’s top prizes, ends a surprisingly long drought for one of the world’s top architecture cities, which was home to past gold medal winners Mies van der Rohe in 1960 and Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949.
It comes after another Chicago-based woman in the traditionally male-dominated field of architecture, Jeanne Gang, recently won the Urban Land Institute’s top honor: the 2022 ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.
The AIA award, which began in 1907, “honors an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture,” the organization said this week in a statement.
“Barney is being recognized for her pursuit of architecture that betters the daily life of all who interact with it through nearly five decades of work,” the statement said.
Other past winners of the AIA’s annual prize have included Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava, Cesar Pelli and, posthumously, Thomas Jefferson.
The 2022 award went to Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa.
Barney, a Chicago native, graduated with bachelor’s and master’s in architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, followed by a Peace Corps stint in Costa Rica.
After working at the architecture firm Holabird & Root, she founded Ross Barney Architects in her hometown in 1981.
When Barney was chosen for the Oklahoma City Federal Building, she became the first woman to lead any commission of its kind, according to the AIA.
Other projects include flagship McDonald’s restaurants in Chicago and Walt Disney Resort in Florida.
Barney’s designs in Chicago include the intermodal terminal at O’Hare International Airport, two new Chicago Transit Authority train stations and two redesigned stations, and the Searle Visitor Center at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Her firm also has designed the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation Synagogue in Evanston, Illinois, the architecture and design buildings at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois, the Swenson Civil Engineering Building in Duluth, Minnesota, and the NASA Aerospace Communications Building in Cleveland.
Ross Barney Architects also led the creation of a framework plan for The 606, a 2.7-mile elevated trail on former rail lines and a series of connected parks on Chicago’s North Side.