Architectural Record honored Auburn University’s Emily McGlohn and four other deserving recipients of the 2025 Women in Architecture Design Leadership Awards, the 12th year of the Women in Architecture (WIA) Awards. On September 9, Record held the awards ceremony and reception gala, lifting up and celebrating the accomplishments of women in the profession, in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s S.R. Crown Hall, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe and is the seat of IIT’s architecture program. The ceremony honoring these stellar architects was the centerpiece of the evening, bookended by cocktails and a reception. The gala was the first of a two-event lineup, the second being the Sustainability in Practice conference hosted the following day in Crown Hall.
Emily is an associate professor at Rural Studio, a design-build studio at AU’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, and housed in Newbern, AL, 2.5 hours from Auburn’s main campus. She is also an extension specialist for the University. The Studio and University rely on Emily’s expertise in multiple ways: coordinating and teaching the 3rd-year design studio, collaborating to solve urgent rural wastewater issues with other members of the Alabama Rural Water and Wastewater Consortium, and even establishing Rural Studio as the pilot location for the Consortium’s first decentralized “cluster” wastewater system.
Fueled by her work with students building for the local community, Emily incorporates teaching techniques like empathetic drawing to cultivate both students’ powers of observation and their empathy to understand how clients actually live and use spaces rather than idealized notions of how students imagine they live. Her experience teaching at Rural Studio since 2017 has deepened her understanding of residential design and contemporary building enclosures, as well as client engagement.
Dawn Finley, Dean of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction and McWhorter Endowed Chair, spoke to the import of this award, saying, “This recognition highlights Emily’s unique design leadership and the extraordinary impact of her work at Auburn University and Rural Studio, underscoring the national significance of her contributions to teaching, building, and shaping resilient communities.”
Emily is part of a world-class cohort of 2025 laureates, whose profiles have been published by Architectural Record. In short, Gina Bocra serves as vice president of the Built Ecology team at WSP; Chandra Robinson is a principal at Portland, Oregon–based Lever Architecture; Roberta Washington founded Roberta Washington Projects (RWP), a Harlem-based architectural practice with over 40 years of accomplishments; and Cynthia Weese, a founding partner of Weese Langley Weese, is also winner of the 2023 AIA Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award. The impressive jury for this year’s awards included past awardees Carol Ross Barney (2022) and Anne Marie Duvall Decker (2023); Julie Hiromoto, partner and director of integration at HKS; climate leader and strategist Yasemin Kologlu; and Mark Gardner of Jaklitsch/Gardner.
When Emily returned from receiving her WIA Award in Chicago, she jumped right back to work. She is leading Rural Studio’s 3rd-year students in designing and building the CREED House, a one-bedroom, one-bathroom client project—and prototype—that extends decades of Rural Studio’s housing affordability and resilience research. Awards at the podium one day and boots on the Hale County ground the next!
Photography credit: Brad Meese