Chicago architect John Vinci will receive this year’s lifetime achievement award from the AIA Chicago, the local chapter announced in June. Vinci’s work includes preservation activism—he helped reconstruct Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room inside the Art Institute of Chicago—and original designs like the Arts Club of Chicago and the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame. He is a principal of the design firm Vinci Hamp Architects.

“No one has moved so effortlessly from past to present to future as John Vinci,” AIA Chicago executive vice president Zurich Esposito said in a statement. “His designs are rooted in history and informed by his scholarship yet most certainly of our time.”

Vinci will be feted at Designight, AIA Chicago’s 59th Annual Design Excellence Awards, at Navy Pier on October 24. Last year’s recipient was Stanley Tigerman.

Read more about Vinci at the Art Institute of Chicago’s website, where he talks to Betty J. Blum about his career, design philosophy, and discovering preservation while at the Illinois Institute of Technology:

If you believe in something and fight for it, it’s a strong statement about the society. And certainly preservation has had a hold on the society. Cities are rethinking themselves.”