The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion has been honored with an American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design. The Josey Pavilion is the state’s first Living Building, the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment. Since 1994, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press, have organized The American Architecture Awards to honor the best, new significant buildings and landscape and planning projects designed or built in the United States and abroad by the most important American architects, landscape architects, and urban planners practicing nationally and internationally and International architects and designers practicing inside the USA.

The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion is among the prestigious AIA Committee on the Environment’s (COTE’s) Top Ten award winners, as reported by Architectural Record. Designed by Lake|Flato, the pavilion was recently certified as Texas’s first Living Building. The education and event center on Dixon Ranches Leo Unit has received several other honors, including the 2015 Architizer A+ Award for Architecture + Sustainability, the 2015 Texas Society of Architects Design Award, and the 2014 AIA San Antonio Design Award.

“This year’ s best buildings proved that architecture doesn’t have to be loud to be important,” begins Julie Iovine in the Wall Street Journal’s article, “The Best Architecture of 2015.” The Betty and Clint Josey Pavilion tops their list of four buildings that “stand out not only for their silhouettes but for working with what already exists, with what their communities need, with the environment and, above all, with an expectation of lasting for longer than a season of attention-grabbing headlines.”

The pavilion is the foundation’s 5,000 square-foot meeting and education center at Dixon Ranches Leo Unit in Cooke County. It’s on track to become Texas’s first Living Building, the most rigorous international green-building certification.

“Architects Ted Flato and David Lake posit that a connection to beautiful architecture can lead to caring and a desire to preserve and conserve one’s surroundings. This low-key, elegant building makes a case that it could truly be so,” Iovine writes.