2026 Design Awards Jurors

Rauzia Ally, AIA, is the Vice President, Studio Leader of LEO A DALY’s Washington, DC office and Director of the Federal Civilian Market for the firm.

For the last 35 years, Rauzia has worked in large and small firms, and she has owned her own award-winning firm from 2000 to 2022.  She has worked on a range of projects involving architectural design, preservation, and adaptive reuse.  Her scope of experience varies from large scale new office buildings to several types of institutional buildings that extend from embassies and corporate headquarters to university law schools, and libraries. Often these culturally significant civic minded buildings have involved fitting skillfully into historic or urban contexts; they explore the relationship between historic architecture and new interventions with a rich repertoire of inventive solutions.

Prior to joining LEO A DALY, Rauzia managed the master plan and oversaw all design projects for the DC Courts.  She also managed the modernization of the large capital projects for DC Public Library including the award-winning Martin Luther King Jr. Library, Mies’s only DC building and only library.  Just prior to that, she managed the conceptual design of 2100 L Street, which won a NAIOP award in 2021 for best new office building in DC. Most recently, she has led the LEO A DALY team to win numerous awards including two Chicago Athenaeum Awards.

Rauzia served for six years, from 2012 to 2018, on DC’s Historic Preservation Review Board, nominated by then Mayor Vincent Gray. Rauzia has also taught at the university level from 2000 to 2012, creating Catholic University’s award-winning Comprehensive Capstone Studio.  She also coordinated the efforts for DC first Solar Decathlon entry in 2013 between team members CUA, GWU, and American University.

As Studio Leader and Director of Federal Civilian, Rauzia sets strategy while providing encouragement, inspiration, and guidance without taking over. A valued skill in leading is empowering—letting each person discover who they are.

Rauzia earned an MBA from Johns Hopkins University in 2022, just prior to assuming the leadership of LEO A DALY in Washington, DC.

Javier Arizmendi, FAIA leads the design of a significant portfolio of architecture and urbanism projects in various geographic locations and practice areas. His built and active design work is located in North America, China, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Over the past 20 years, Javier has designed and executed a significant body of work, demonstrating that regionalism and technology are not exclusive, but complementary to each other. He has designed advanced, innovative architectural and engineering solutions that resonate with place. Anchored in their specific environmental, cultural, and urban context, his buildings have improved and strengthened our cities and the spaces in which we live and work, with a humanistic architecture that recognizes and supports the diversity of cultures, people, and places.

Javier’s work leverages passive environmental strategies such as self-shading, natural ventilation, daylighting and thermal mass to effectively shape and orient buildings. His study and adaptation of local and traditional environmental responses to specific sites has resulted in an architecture that is technically innovative and culturally resonant.

Javier is a graduate of Dartmouth College where he earned degrees in Engineering Science and Art History. His interest in the integration of engineering and art led him to seek a Master’s Degree in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design.  Javier is currently a Design Principal at Skidmore.  In addition to architecture, Javier is a professional painter, a practice that allows for the free exploration of meaning through color, form, writing and gesture.

Marlon Blackwell, FAIA together with his partner in life and work, Ati Blackwell, AIA, ASID lead the internationally recognized practice Marlon Blackwell Architects. Their work has received recognition with significant publication and more than 200 design awards including the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture and the 2025 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize. Working between the universal language of architecture and the particulars of place, they have cultivated a studio recognized for its formal clarity, contextual depth, and architectural integrity. In 2020, Marlon was honored with the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects for his enduring impact on the theory and practice of architecture. He’s a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an inductee of the American Academy of Arts and Science. Equally respected as an educator, he served as the E. Fay Jones Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas where he taught for over 30 years. Most recently, he was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale University for the Fall of 2025. A monograph of their recent work, titled “Radical Practice”, was published in 2022 by Princeton Architectural Press.