Salmela Architect

Architecture and PlanningUnited States2-10 Employees

David Salmela FAIA practices in Duluth, Minnesota.  He has worked in Architecture since 1969 and has lived in Minnesota all of his life.  Projects which represent his broad assembly of work are Brandenburg’s Ravenwood Studio in Ely, MN and the Emerson Sauna in rural Duluth, MN.  They both won National AIA Honor Awards for Architecture in 1998 and 2005, respectively.  Also, a 2005 National AIA Honor Award winner for Regional and Urban Design was the Jackson Meadow Development in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota.  Recently, the Yingst Pavilion was awarded a 2011 National AIA Small Projects Award and the Bagley Classroom Building an AIA 2012 COTE Top Ten Green Projects Award for the Finest Sustainable Projects in the United States. 

Overall, David has won over 50 regional and national design awards. In 2005 the monograph, Salmela/Architect by University of Minnesota Dean of the College of Design, Thomas Fisher, was published.  David’s work has been featured, nationally and internationally, in Abitare, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, Graphis, Architecture, ID, Monocle, Hauser and Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary Architecture.  

In 2007 David received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Minnesota.  David was presented the AIA Minnesota Gold Medal in December of 2008.  In 2011, a second book, also by Fisher, The Invisible Element of Place: The Architecture of David Salmela, was published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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