Sarah Whiting earns Architectural Record honor

Architectural Record magazine has honored Dean Sarah Whiting, Rice’s William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture, with a Women in Architecture Design Leadership award.

Sarah Whiting

She was named educator of the year, one of five categories in this year’s fourth annual awards. The winners will be honored at an Oct. 25 reception in New York.

“I’m thrilled to receive this recognition for doing what I love to do here at the Rice School of Architecture,” Whiting said. “I hope I’m a role model, not just for our female students but for all of our students, defined not by gender, not by race, not by age, and not by ethnicity, but by a common ambition to design a better future.”

Whiting joined Rice as dean of the School of Architecture in 2010 and has helped it embrace the concept of speculative practice, through which students are taught to explore the discipline in depth as they work toward both their final projects for school and a career in the field.

She is a founding partner of WW Architecture and holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, a master of architecture from Princeton and a doctorate in architectural history, theory and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Two of the other five honorees have Rice connections. Marion Weiss, a founding partner of architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi, takes part in Rice’s preceptorship program through which students spend a year working in significant architectural practices around the world between their fourth and fifth years of study. The magazine honored Weiss as this year’s design leader. Billie Faircloth, honored as this year’s “innovator,” is a practitioner, educator and partner at KieranTimberlake, also a participant in the preceptorship program.

See the full list of honorees at http://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/12927-women-in-architecture-awards-honor-pioneering-professionals.