“A brilliant collision of community, typography, language, and identity, all in a single plane of metal. Bravo!” — Juror 

The art gate at Washington School for the Deaf received a Merit Award at the 2025 SEGD Global Design Awards. Mayer/Reed Senior Designer and Associate Debbie Shaw attended the November 13 ceremony in San Francisco to receive the honor. The awards recognize innovation in experiential design, celebrating projects that shape how people experience the built environment. The Mayer/Reed-designed art gate was one of 30 winners out of nearly 300 submissions at the international awards program this year. 

The 72-foot gate, laser-cut with custom hand-lettering, is a focal point of the campus redesign by Mithun and Skanska. The jury praised the art gate’s “…beautifully crafted design that marries sophisticated metal work with the youthfulness of primary education and the building blocks of learning language. The best part of this installation is the shadows it projects on the ground, making the ASL signs a multidimensional fabric of the campus.”