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November 1, 2025NDC Receives 2025 Jim Dilts Award for 60th Anniversary Book
NDC staffer Maura Dwyer and board member Randy Sovich attended AIA Baltimore’s annual Excellence in Design Awards to accept the 2025 Jim Dilts Award on behalf of the Neighborhood Design Center!
We’re excited to share that this award will support our efforts to publish a book honoring our 60th anniversary. This book project with the working title Place Matters: Sixty Years of Community Design in Baltimore, will celebrate how people, art, and design have shaped the neighborhoods we call home. The $1000 award will support staff in the work of creating the book with the goal to publish by 2028.
A huge thank-you to the Baltimore Architecture Foundation (BAF) for this recognition. And to our board chair, Randy Sovich, thank you for your continued support and guidance.
We’re grateful to BAF and the AIA Baltimore Chapter for celebrating the legacy of community-engaged design and for hosting such an inspiring evening honoring Baltimore’s creative spirit.
The Vision for the Book
Place Matters will be a vibrant, visually rich anthology, blending art and essay, the book will showcase the power of place through the eyes of Baltimore’s most insightful writers and visionary artists. Each section will pair a short essay about a Baltimore neighborhood or place with original visual work—photography, collage, illustration, or mixed media—by a local artist.
These artist-writer pairings will illuminate how Baltimore’s physical spaces reflect the city’s social, cultural, and political history, as well as the creative energy and resilience of its people.
The volume will open with a powerful essay on NDC’s role in shaping equitable, participatory design in the region and conclude with a forward-looking section on the future of community-led design.
About the Jim Dilts Award
The Jim Dilts Award is a monetary prize of $1,000 that is awarded to an individual or organization that creates publicly accessible works that celebrate or educate about Baltimore’s architecture, past, present, or future. This year, Neighborhood Design Center has earned the award support of your work on Sixty Years of Design Democracy: The Neighborhood Design Center and Baltimore’s Built Future!
The Jim Dilts Award was created in memory of author, Baltimore Sun reporter, and BAF board member James D. Dilts. As a founding member of BAF’s ‘Dead Architects Society’ Jim authored and edited many books, including A Guide to Baltimore Architecture, The Great Road, the Building of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, The World the Trains Made and co-authored Baltimore’s Cast-Iron Buildings. In the spirit of Jim Dilts, we ask for the award money to be used towards work that is accessible to the public and has a Baltimore focus. Additionally, we ask that the work or project(s) acknowledge Baltimore Architecture Foundation.