• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 8, 2009

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Award-winning architects credit the Internet and the advent of “sustainable” buildings with making it easier for architects to do work that combines outstanding form with function.

Some architects call the design and construction of the Shaw Center at the southern end of Lafayette Street the single best example of architecture’s coming of age in Baton Rouge.

“Whether you like it or not,” said Clarke J. Gernon Jr. of Remson, Haley, Herpin Architects, “the Shaw Center sparked an interest in downtown.”

Schwartz/Silver Architects, Boston; Eskew Dumez Ripple of New Orleans and Jerry Campbell of Baton Rouge were the Shaw Center’s architects, said Kathleen Gordon, executive director of the American Institute of Architects Baton Rouge. The builder was The Lemoine Co.

Thomas A. Pistorius, 41, Pistorius Associates in Hammond, got a degree in architecture from LSU in 1993.

“I went to Phoenix with some buddies and worked at the same firm 13 years,” he said.

Pistorius moved home to Hammond three years ago to start an architecture practice of his own.

Pistorius’ design of the Northshore Eye Associates Clinic in Hammond took a Rose Award and the Members’ Choice Award at this year’s American Institute of Architects Baton Rouge Rose Awards competition.

For some Baton Rouge architects, the Shaw Center did for commercial design what the work of A. Hays Town and John Desmond did for residential design.

“The Shaw Center surprised me,” Pistorius said. “It made me feel good about what was going on in Louisiana. It reinforced the river for me. The first time I went up to Tsunami (restaurant), the view blew me away.”

In selecting Pistorius’ design of the eye clinic for the “Members Choice” award, fellow architects “scanned through the entries to get an immediate feeling,” said Gernon, whose firm won last year’s “Members’ Choice” for the design of Victory Commons condominiums across Nicholson Drive from the LSU Natatorium.

“It’s how the project pulls together,” he said. “Site, budget, what it does for the program (how the building is to be used) go into architects’ picking the best of their colleagues’ work.”

The annual awards recognize designs that don’t get built as well as ones that do.