Inga Saffron Selected as the 2025 Paul Philippe Cret Award Recipient

Congratulations to Inga Saffron on being selected as the 2025 Paul Philippe Cret Award Recipient!

The Paul Philippe Cret Award recognizes individuals or organizations who are not traditional architects but who have made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the design of buildings, structures, landscapes, and the public realm of Greater Philadelphia.

Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For more than 25 years, she has been a forceful advocate for meaningful design, accessible public spaces and transit, affordable housing, historic preservation and policies that make our cities more liveable and climate resilient.  Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum,  a 2012  Loeb Fellowship from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.  

Inga began her career as a municipal reporter in New Jersey,  and went on to become a foreign correspondent in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the 1990s, she covered wars in Yugoslavia and Russia, where she witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. She has published two books: Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again, a selection of her Inquirer columns, and Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, a cultural history of the sturgeon. She is currently working on a social and architectural history of the American newspaper building, tentatively titled Holding the Presses: How Newspaper Buildings Shaped the American City. 

Tickets are live for the 2025 AIA Philadelphia Design Awards Celebration and can be purchased HERE.