Coliseum Place–an all-electric, affordable housing building in Oakland–has been recognized with the national AIA COTE Top Ten Award for 2025, presented in June at the AIA Conference on Architecture and Design. Each year, a jury selects 10 projects that demonstrate holistic excellence, integrating design and performance
About the award
The AIA COTE Top Ten Awards program is in its 28th year and highlights projects that meet rigorous criteria for social, economic, and ecological value. The Committee on the Environment (COTE®) Top Ten award program was founded on the idea that sustainability is essential to design excellence and vice versa. The COTE® Top Ten has become the industry’s best-known award program recognizing innovative projects integrating exemplary performance with compelling design.
About Coliseum Place
Coliseum Place is an all-electric affordable building that points toward a thriving collective future. The new community provides 58 affordable family homes, street trees, biofiltration features, and improved pedestrian safety next to a major transit stop, reclaiming a prominent site that lacked sidewalks, healthy soil or vegetation, and street drainage.
Coliseum Place transforms a severely underutilized contaminated site into a vibrant community of family homes that meets the definition of a zero-emissions building while also embodying the principle of discovery—serving as the subject of several research studies that advanced sustainable design best practices for affordable multifamily housing without imposing burden on low-income residents.
Learn more about this project on the AIA awards site, on our project page, and on this Living Future Affordable Housing Pilot Project Case Study.