LANZA Atelier at League Prize 2017: Support

The Architectural League announces the winners of “Support,” the thirty-sixth edition of the annual Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers program.

The League Prize is one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects and designers. The program exemplifies the League’s longstanding commitment to identifying and nurturing the development of talented young architects and designers. This year’s winners are:

• Jonathan Louie and Nicole McIntosh, Architecture Office, Syracuse, NY
• Isabel Martínez Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, LANZA Atelier, Mexico City
• Michelle JaJa Chang, Houston, TX
• Kevin Hirth, Kevin Hirth Co., Denver, CO
• Mustafa Faruki, theLab-lab for architecture, New York, NY
• Greg Corso and Molly Hunker, Sports, Syracuse, NY

This year’s theme for the portfolio competition, Support, identified a present situation in which precarious forms and precarious social arrangements exist side by side. How does one clarify the modes of support in architecture today when the discipline’s role is obscured by a tangled network in which exchanges between built form and various systems of framing, assistance, and reinforcement are constantly in flux?

Open to designers ten years or less out of a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree program, the competition draws entrants from throughout North America. Winners will lecture in June and show their work in an exhibition on view during the summer in New York City. Their ideas and work will also be featured in original editorial content on the League’s website.

For LANZA Atelier, exhibitions “become moments of possibility and study.” Founded in 2015 by Isabel Martínez Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, the Mexico City-based practice insists on calling exhibition design “exhibition architecture,” and approaches its residential and public projects with the same risk-taking approach that they foster with their work in the realm of the gallery and museum.