The PlaceMark award is given by the journal Places to an individual who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in the creation of places. The PlaceMark seeks to honor a person who has both spoken passionately and persistently through their design accomplishments, and evolved a practice that is strongly grounded in public service. It seeks to acknowledge a person who work has not only stretched our concepts of process and form, but also awakened the public to new possibilities for places that can be shared by our diverse society.

A signature aspect of the PlaceMark is that a stainless steel medallion is given to each PlaceMark recipient, who is asked to set it in a place that he or she has helped to create and would like to consider as a benchmark for measuring subsequent achievements.

The current recipient of the PlaceMark is architect Hugh Hardy, FAIA, of Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer Associates, who has helped shape the public life of cities through a continuing series of innovative projects. He has changed our understanding of the ways in which architects much reach out to nurture the complex financial, organizational and artistic relationships that inform the life of a place. His work adroitly captures the spirit of time and place, often through acknowledging and giving vigorous new life to the inspirations of previous generations. He sees promise where others see restriction, proffers courage when others are cowed, and stewards the qualities of place with a fertile imagination and a fearlessly unconventional sense of propriety.

Hardy has set his PlaceMark on the terrace of the Bryant Park Grill in New York City's Bryant Park, whose dramatic revival after a 1991 restoration was a signal event in the revivial of urban open space. The redesign and reconstruction was attentive to the growing body of research about this place and urban parks in general, and the project was a model of professional collaboration and public-private partnership in the revival of urban open spaces.

Hardy's work is profiled in Places 14.2.

Previously, the PlaceMark was awarded to landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who has combined certainty of vision with an uncommon openness to innovation and change. He has not only continued to bring fresh insights himself, but also led the way in encouraging others to bring ideas and convictions to the table at the early stages of the design process. Halprin set his PlaceMark in the plaza of the Levi Strauss corporate headquarters in San Francisco, a space intimately engaged not only with the surrounding workplace, but also with the streets, hills and bay beyond.

An interview with Halprin can be found in Places 11.3.