75 Year Awards

75 Year Award: Glazebrook House, Bristol, VT. Completed in 1973. Designed by Turner Brooks, AIA.

Turner Brooks’ first house design, Glazebrook was for a potter and her son who needed an affordable house in which to live and work. Brooks’ design fee was paid in pots, and he made $4.50 an hour as the carpenter who built it. The cost of the project was under $20,000 for  the 1,300 square foot structure. The gable houses the main living area including the kitchen and dining room, with the bedrooms above it.  The shed element includes the studio below and a balcony above that both bedrooms open to.  The kiln is built away from the house connected to the studio with a trestle with small gauge railroad tracks which were rescued from an old brick factory.

Photos: Eric Borg

Client: Caroline Glazebrook

Builder: Turner Brooks

75 Year Award: Church Street Marketplace, Burlington, VT. Completed in 1981. Designed by TruexCullins

The Church Street Marketplace demonstrates planning and design excellence, and how committed citizens and supportive business owners can create and maintain the vitality and vibrancy of an outdoor pedestrian mall and downtown culture.The Marketplace was born in the early 1970s as Bill Truex’s design concept, inspired by the pedestrian plazas of Europe.

Bill joined a small group of Burlington’s civic leaders and initiated a pilot project, closing a busy downtown street to traffic to test the feasibility of a new pedestrian core for downtown.The project was a success and led to the active planning and design of the pedestrian marketplace over the following decade. Bill’s leadership resulted in the permanent removal of vehicle traffic from Church Street and its conversion into the award-winning Church Street Marketplace. The project involved an unprecedented closing of a major vehicular artery to create pedestrian linkages throughout the downtown area. Collectively, these and other urban improvements decisively enhanced the quality of Burlington’s downtown, contributing to the city center’s lively character and commercial vitality.

75 Year Award: Bundy Modern, Waitsfield, VT. Completed in 1962. Designed by Harlow Carpenter

Built in 1962 as an art gallery and sculpture park, one approaches this massive floating brick and glass cube up a long, steep dirt road through a tunnel of evergreens. Sited on a 15 acre light-filled natural high plateau, the building is reflected in a half-acre parabolic pond and softened by massive trailing berms. The Bundy Modern is a stunning example of pure modernism in a country setting.The Bundy has been a gallery, art school, concert venue, host of the VSO and Circus Smirkus, along with countless community events. It has always been a center for the arts and continues that mission today. Some 2,000 people visit each year to enjoy the curated exhibitions. The powerful and flawless design continues to delight visitors as much today as when if first opened to the public. 

75 Year Award: Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Burlington, VT. Completed in 1973. Designed by Tom Cullins, AIA & Burlington Assoc.

The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, notable structure in Downtown Burlington, was designed for its functionality, flexibility, and beauty.  In its 50th year, it endures as a bold expression of brutalist design in a stunning location. Constructed and consecrated in 1973 after the fire that destroyed the former Cathedral on St. Paul Street in 1971, the Cathedral’s design is the result of an international design competition where a local firm, Burlington Associates, was selected blindly.  The design was heavily influenced by the massive urban renewal projects happening in Burlington at the time. A prevalent feeling then was that the new building ought both to redefine what a cathedral should look like and to return to medieval ideas about the vital role of a cathedral in its city. 

75 Year Award: HULA, Burlington, VT. Completed in 2021. Designed by SAS Architects.

The Blodgett Oven factory formerly occupied this 14-acre site in Burlington’s South End neighborhood along prime waterfront. The complex, coated with decades of manufacturing grime, sat as a decaying barrier to public access. The Hula project sought to continue the waterfront transformation by returning the factory and land to community use while also creating a new center for technology and innovation in Vermont. The two large factories, close to 150,000 SF in total, have been utterly transformed. The exterior shells were insulated and opened with long swathes of efficient glazing to offer daylight and visual connection to the lake and mountains beyond. Rooftop solar arrays and a geothermal system make the building a leader in sustainability. The interior spaces have been designed to emphasize community connection with offices, workspaces, cafes, lounges, and event spaces organized throughout–allowing companies of all sizes to grow and feed off a collective communal energy. 

75 Year Award: Union Mutual Insurance Building, Montpelier, VT. Completed in 1958. Designed by Freeman French Freeman

The Union Mutual Fire Insurance Building in Montpelier is one of Vermont’s finest examples of modern architecture. Still owned and occupied by Union Mutual, the building looks much the same today as it did when it first opened in 1958. The building’s exterior of steel,stone, glass and concrete blends effortlessly into the surrounding landscape. Though thoroughly modern, the building’s timeless quality and use of natural materials allows it to sit comfortably alongside many of Vermont’s most cherished historic buildings in Montpelier. What’s more, the building continues to serve its original owner as a place of business, thanks to thoughtful additions and careful upgrades. 

75 Year Award: Former Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, Burlington, VT. Completed in 1977. Designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes; Landscape Architecture by Daniel Urban Kiley.

In 1972, following the fiery destruction of the original Cathedral, the Roman Catholic Diocese chose to build a new, modern cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on the same downtown site.Embracing an optimistic and forward-thinking approach to the design of the new cathedral, the Diocese hired building architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and landscape architect Daniel Urban Kiley to create an urban sanctuary for quiet reflection, contemplation, and religious practice. Constructed of glazed green and brown brick with a soaring copper roof, the cathedral building sits in the midst of a grove of honey locust trees planted in a skewed grid.

The angles of the triangular sanctuary are carried into the landscape by the linear tree plantings, and the building’s glazed brick references the brown trunks and green foliage of the honey locusts. The site and building design are inter-dependent upon and represent one of the very few projects in Vermont that combines the skill and vision of two acknowledged modern masters in their respective fields. No longer used by the Diocese for religious services, the fate of this important modernist landmark in Burlington’s urban core is unknown.

75 Year Award: Rock of Ages Visitors Center, Graniteville, VT. Completed in 2002. Designed by gbArchitecture.

The visitor center is a highly visible “front doorway” to an already popular tourist destination for the Rock of Ages Corporation. The overall open design serves as a welcoming starting point to factory and granite quarry tours. The design of this visitor center had to visually compete with a massive manufacturing plant which it serves while sitting adjacent to it on the same site. The grades of the ground plane were sculpted to form a shallow dome that gives the building foreground height over the manufacturing plant. The curved forms of the building and the site elements serve as a counterpoint to the blocky massing of the factory. A floating plane roof, tilted on two axis, is perched above the site on randomly spaced and sized columns. Trees planted within the circular bus access drive are similarly placed to reinforce the interior/exterior interface.

75 Year Award Citation: The Pitcher Inn, Warren, VT. Completed in 1997. Designed by Bast & Rood Architects and Sellers & Co.

When the 19th century Pitcher Inn suffered a catastrophic fire in the early 1990s, there was fear that the establishment might never open again due to permitting issues and could be replaced with a convenience store. Bast, Rood, and Sellers, working together with a vision for a new inn on the site, sorted out the permitting issues and brought in Win Smith to purchase the property. The reconstruction project was fast-tracked, with construction documents being produced while the project was being built, staying one step ahead of the contractors. David Sellers designed the building and oversaw the creation of the uniquely themed guest rooms, each representing a different aspect of Vermont life or history. Mac Rood, for example, designed the Chester Arthur room. Working with scores of colleagues, designers, and craftspeople, including masons, muralists, furniture makers, and woodcarvers, Bast & Rood Architects and Sellers & Co. created an artisanal, one-of-a-kind experience for visitors and guests to enjoy. The new Pitcher Inn opened in 1997 and is going strong today.

75 Year Award Citation: Burr & Burton Academy: Mountain Campus, Manchester, VT. Completed in 2012. Designed by Randall S. Walter, AIA

The Burr and Burton Mountain Campus building represents the environmental history, locality, and potential of Vermont through its design and construction. The team developed this environmentally conscious building to function as a living classroom. The building, situated on a 100-acre parcel of woodland, is occupied by 40-50 students and four faculty members each semester, supporting the mission of the Mountain Campus program: to foster students’ growth as individuals, community members, and citizens of a sustainable world.

Photos by Al Karevy and Marvin Windows and Doors.