Book awards 2025
The 2025 Cramer Center Book Awards celebrate outstanding work in design and scholarship, recognizing excellence across four categories:
Historic Preservation
Professional Practice and Innovation
Environment and Sustainability
The Business of Design
Cramer Center for Design & Innovation Announces Inaugural Book Award Winners
The Cramer Center for Design & Innovation announces the winners of its inaugural Book Awards, celebrating exceptional contributions to design and scholarship. Submissions from 2022 to 2024 highlighted innovative ideas and outstanding work from a wide range of academic and design-focused publishers.
How the Winners Were Chosen
A panel of distinguished judges from the Cramer Center Board reviewed all entries, assessing each work for:
- Quality of research
- Clarity and excellence of writing
- Impactful visual presentation and use of design principles
- Overall contribution to scholarship
One title in each category was recognized as an honor winner, with a single book earning the overall award — celebrating remarkable innovation and insight in design.
Looking Ahead
Submissions for the 2025 Cramer Center Book Awards for Design & Innovation will open soon. Publishers of 2025 releases are invited to participate in this exciting, newly launched program, with winners to be celebrated in 2026.
Overall Winner
Tye Farrow, Constructive Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health, University of Toronto Press.
The Cramer Center for Design & Innovation is thrilled to announce Tye Farrow’s Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health as the overall winner of its first-ever Book Awards. Farrow’s groundbreaking work shows how the spaces we inhabit—from homes and schools to workplaces and communities—can actively support our physical, mental, and social well-being.
Globally recognized designer Tye Farrow takes readers on an inspiring journey, showing how thoughtfully designed environments can nurture us much like meaningful personal relationships. Filled with striking visuals and practical ideas, the book makes complex research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience accessible and actionable, offering readers ways to enhance daily life through intentional design.
Robert Russell, Chair of the Review Committee, said: “Constructing Health is a remarkable achievement. Tye Farrow turns cutting-edge science into a compelling guide that demonstrates how thoughtful design can truly enhance our daily lives. We are thrilled to honor it as our overall award winner.”
Honor Titles
The Cramer Center Book Awards honor exceptional works that illuminate the ways we live, learn, and connect in the world around us. This year’s honor titles span history, urban design, and cultural architecture: Jeffrey B. Schmidt brings Oklahoma’s vanishing towns to life; Scott Higgins and Paul Kalbfleisch reimagine mid-sized cities as engines of community and connection; and Anat Geva explores the rich architecture of postwar American synagogues. Each book combines engaging storytelling, striking visuals, and thoughtful research, offering fresh perspectives on how people and places shape one another.
Historic Preservation
Jeffrey B. Schmidt. Here Today: Oklahoma’s Ghost Towns, Vanishing Towns, and Towns Persisting against the Odds, University of Oklahoma Press.
Professional Practice and Innovation
Scott Higgins & Paul Kalbfleisch, The JOY Experiments: Reimagining Mid-sized Cities to Heal Our Divided Society. Dundurn Press.
Environment and Sustainability
Tye Farrow, Constructive Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health, University of Toronto Press.
Business of Design
Anat Geva. The Architecture of Modern America Synagogues, 1950s-1960s, Texas A&M University Press.