Free Recorded Webinar: Submitting a Successful Design Award Nomination

A free training webinar to introduce you to the critical process and parts of a successful preservation design award application.

Required Materials – How to Apply Online

Each entrant must submit all required materials online. The list below includes descriptions and requirements for all required materials. If you have any questions, please call CPF at 415-495-0349 or email cpf@californiapreservation.org.

Award Categories

1. Preservation or Restoration

Preservation: This category includes the process of sustaining the form and extent of a structure, as it now exists. Preservation aims at halting further deterioration and providing structural stability, but does not involve significant rebuilding, restoration, or rehabilitation.

Restoration: This category addresses projects that accurately depict the form, features, and character of a property or structure as it appeared in a particular period of time by means of the removal of features from other periods in its history and reconstruction of missing features from the restoration period. Emphasis is on historical accuracy.

2. Rehabilitation

This category recognizes projects that make possible the continued historic use, or a compatible new use, through repair, alterations and additions, while preserving those portions or features which convey a site or structure’s historical, cultural or architectural values.

3. Reconstruction or Contextual Infill

Reconstruction: This category includes the act or process of depicting, by means of new construction, a non-surviving site, landscape, building, structure, or object to replicate its appearance at a specific period of time and in its historic location. Emphasis is on historical accuracy.

Contextual Infill: This category includes compatible freestanding new construction adjacent, or in relation to, historic structures. Such work should reflect the compatibility of new work with historic properties in regard to matters of massing, size, scale, architectural features and the protection of the historic character of the property and its contextual surroundings.

4. Craftsmanship/Preservation Technology

Outstanding workmanship carried out in a project such as those specified above may be submitted in one of those categories and/or the Craftsmanship/Preservation Technology award. This category honors excellence in craftsmanship or technological innovation pertaining to a single element of an overall preservation project, such as stained glass restoration, duplication of historic wall finish or mural, wrought iron, stonework, etc. or practices to historic structures or sites, which promote environmental design,material and energy conservation, and an improved quality of life.

5. Cultural Resource Studies, Reports

This category includes creative, innovative, and precedent-setting approaches to technological issues, preservation planning issues, and educational awareness or advancement. Products submitted for this award may include, but are not limited to: architectural and/or historical inventories or surveys, historic structure reports, register nominations, computer software developed for preservation activities, planning studies, research papers, technological reports, film/video documentaries, and historic preservation elements of general plans.

6. Archaeology and Interpretive Exhibits: Archaeology

This category recognizes the scientific study and preservation of the vestigial remains of the built environment of previous cultures and societies; eligible work may include the documentation, stabilization or interpretation of the material remnants of structures associated with past human life and activities. Interpretive Exhibits: This category also recognizes projects that provide or integrate exhibits that offer information about an historic feature or site; eligible work may include interpretation of features or sites that bring to life the people, construction techniques, materials, or events associated with the place. Exhibits may be temporary or permanent.

7. Cultural Heritage, Intangible Assets

This category takes the preservation practice beyond structures of merit to award efforts to document or recognize living rituals, memorialization, and cultural practices or movements.

Intangible Assets: This category may include but is not limited to: traditions or living expressions inherited from ancestors and passed on to descendants, such as oral traditions; performing arts; social practices; rituals; festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts. Award nominations in this category could include survey and documentation efforts, exhibits, nominations, public outreach efforts, or other significant efforts to recognize and communicate intangible heritage.

Cultural Heritage: This category includes the recognition, documentation, or study of significant sites, practices, or movements that define California’s cultural history, including political, social, and other cultural movements. Sites of memory and consciousness that hold significance for painful or otherwise important historical moments or movements would fall under this category.

Entry Form

Please enter your login information below and save this information in a safe place in case you’d like to return to your application or edit it. 

Login and Edit an Existing Application

Remember, to log in to an existing application, your username would be the email address used to submit the application, and the password is the password you created earlier. Visit this link to continue your application.