The Architectural League of New York has announced the winners of its thirty-fifth annual Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. First launched in 1981 and selected by a committee of former recipients and League Program Director Anne Rieselbach, the Architectural League Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to young architects, who are recognized for their talent and forward-thinking ideas. This year’s theme for the competition, “(im)permanence”, asks how time plays a role in architectural style, means of assembly, and its relationship to program which ultimately alters expectations of architecture in an “impermanent environment.”
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, DESIGN EARTH, Cambridge, MA and Ann Arbor, MI
DESIGN EARTH’s work “engages the geographic to open up to a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.” This summer, the firm will participate in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in Kuwait’s pavilion.
Juan Alfonso Garduño Jardó, G3 Arquitectos, Querétaro, Mexico
G3 has embarked on an ongoing investigation which “seeks to encourage citizen participation in citymaking by inverting the existing neoliberal model for another one based in the reactivation of the collective realm.” G3 creates designs, of programatic spaces and pavilions constructed in underutilized areas across Querétaro that are approved by the respective communities.
Neyran Turan and Mete Sonmez, NEMESTUDIO, San Francisco, CA
NEMESTUDIO engages in work ranging from installations, to buildings, and landscapes. Its “speculations draw upon the capacity of architecture to define a new relational aesthetic, one that is invested in questions of form and representation while being extremely rigorous about architecture’s relationship to the city, the environment, and geography.”
Neeraj Bhatia, The Open Workshop, Francisco, CA
Founded in 2011, this studio is dedicated to “reconciling and empowering the role of architecture within the transforming, evolving, fluctuating, and indeterminate conditions of the city, its public sphere, and its ecological context through reevaluation of Umberto Eco’s concept of The Open Work.“
Hubert Pelletier and Yves de Fontenay, Pelletier de Fontenay, Montreal, Canada
The Montreal-based studio is “specifically interested in the relationship between the abstract concepts of architecture and their material incarnations.” Recently, Pelletier de Fontenay, in collaboration with Kuehn Malvezzi and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte, was named one of the winning teams in the international competition to design educational buildings for the ”Espace pour la Vie” museum campus in Montreal and their design is expected to be completed in 2017.
Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest, Ultramoderne, Providence, RI
The office, which was founded in 2013, is “committed to creating architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous.” In 2015, Ultramoderne realized Chicago Horizon, the BP Prize winner in the Chicago Lakefront Kiosk Competition, designed for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
The jury for the award consisted of Mimi Hoang, Paul Lewis, and Anu Mathur, along with committee members Jason Austin, Gerald Bodziak, and Rychiee Espinosa. The winners, as a part of their prize, will exhibit their work at the Pasrons School of Design and present lectures.
Practice descriptions have been culled from the Architectural League, to learn more about the competition and its winners visit the organization's website here.
