Professor June Williamson, Spitzer School's director of Graduate Architecture, and her co-author Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones are winners of the 2025 Seaside Prize.
The Seaside Institute has bestowed the 2025 Seaside Prize upon The City College of New York’s architect and Professor June Williamson and her writing and research partner Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones. Williamson is director of Graduate Architecture at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. Dunham-Jones is director of the master’s in urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. The Seaside Institute’s award attests to the tremendous impact the duo have had on the built environment via their books and teachings. Co-authors of the groundbreaking “Retrofitting Suburbia” series of books, for over 20 years they have documented and advocated for successful redevelopment, reinhabitation, and regreening of dead shopping malls, aging office parks and other parking-lot-dominated real estate into more resilient, just, and community-serving places.
Their first book “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs,” won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for best architecture and planning book of the year.
The sequel, “Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges,” won a Great Places Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association.
Williamson is also the author of “Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb” which contextualizes and documents an innovative urban design ideas competition for re-envisioning suburban areas of Long Island.
Williamson and Dunham-Jones continue to inspire architects, planners, urban designers, developers, and community leaders to retrofit aging, underperforming suburban properties to address urgent challenges, disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging society, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience. Their work has been widely featured, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, and TED. Williamson also serves on the board of directors of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
The Seaside Prize is an annual award presented by the Seaside Institute to individuals who have made significant contributions to the fields of architecture, urban planning, and community development. The recipients are selected based on their exceptional achievements, commitment to design excellence, and their positive impact on communities around the world.
Williamson and Dunham-Jones receive their award February 8, 2025, from Seaside, Florida, founder Robert Davis, amidst a weekend of festivities beginning Feb. 7, 2025. The Seaside Institute was founded in 1982 as a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the ideas of community, education, and design. Its roots lay in the iconic town of Seaside, Florida, birthplace of new urbanism, and serves as a collaborative hub for architects, urban planners, and community leaders.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi (now Lightcast) puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.
Thea Klapwald
e:
tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu