ICAA Chicago-Midwest Announces 2025 Acanthus Award Winners

On October 4, 2025, the Chicago-Midwest chapter of the ICAA (Institute of Classical Architecture & Art) announced the winners of their annual Acanthus Awards.

Open to all architecture and design professionals and students who work within the boundaries of the ICAA's Chicago-Midwest region, the awards celebrate excellence in contemporary classical design. Awarded categories include architecture, interior design, landscape design, craftsmanship, and preservation.

The Acanthus Awards are named after the acanthus leaf, an herbaceous shrub that's a common classical motif — you see it on Corinthian column capitals — that symbolizes rebirth and immortality. The awards ceremony was held at the Great Banking Hall of the Wintrust Building in downtown Chicago.

For more, discover the 2025 winners of the ICAA Rocky Mountain Benedict Awards, the ICAA Washington Pope Awards, or the ICAA National Ross Awards.

Read on for the 2020 Acanthus award winners.

A fine example of contemporary Islamic architecture, this new facility serves the largest congregation of Muslim people in Indiana. The project included the on-site installation, hand-painting, and gilding of unique Islamic designs. And because the entrant is not Muslim, this was an interfaith collaboration.

This Shingle-style new build on Long Island is designed to feel like it's sat in the landscape for ages. The house wraps around a carefully preserved beech tree, and the rest of the landscape comprises meadow instead of a lawn, along with boxwood, puffy hydrangeas, and gravel pathways that connect the pool, dining terrace, and tennis courts.

In Rochester, Minnesota, under the Catholic diocese of Winona–Rochester, the Mary, Mother of the Eucharist Chapel was recently completed by McNicholas Architects. It's richly ornamented, and the walls bloom with the iconography of the Winona Rose, the Star of Bethlehem, and a pier guilloche pattern.

Winning the renovation category was The Cabana at Pembroke Lodge, originally designed in the 1920s by architect David Adler. Meghan Jay Design was inspired by that '20s glamour along with New England coastal aesthetics to create a space that's fresh, whimsical, and charming, designed to look as great during the day as it does lit by candles at night.

At this rural North Carolina estate, timeless, classical design is combined with modern living. The interior design by Soucie Horner Design Collective is full of richly layered materials, textured finishes that add a rustic elegance, a stylish combination of modern and traditional, and reclaimed wood beams and flooring.

These drawings propose a new academic building for Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. It aims to denote the college's entrance in a style reflective of the Universities of the English Renaissance, like Oxford and Cambridge. It includes highlights of the twin spires of St. Benedict’s church and a vista of the Abbey belfry upon the bluffs of the Missouri River.

Cloes House is a proposal for a senior living facility in Lake Bluff, Illinois. The site would service all phases of senior care under one roof: independent living, assisted living, memory care, and skilled nursing. The project pulls on Arts & Crafts principles like functional simplicity, craftsmanship, and naturalism, for a life care community and an architectural project fundamentally informed by love.