Pamphlet Architecture Award Winners
February 10, 2022
Pamphlet Architecture is pleased to announce the jury’s selected award winners of the competition.
This year’s theme, “Visions and Experiments in Architecture,” invited participants to address the following: How to look into the future while preserving the landscape? How to imagine new light, air, and spatial energy? How to design new architecture for a new consciousness?
First prize with a $5,500 honorarium to develop the proposal and publish Pamphlet Architecture 37 is awarded to Catty Dan Zhang for her submission “Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids.” The project “explores applied visual techniques that challenge conventional definitions of tools, measurements, and material forms. Foregrounding atmospheres as active systems that hybridize physical and computational mediums, it views the architectural production as more void and intangible than solid and mass; more synthesized and networked than spatial and formal; more layer multiply than Boolean subtraction; more medium-hybrids-modulated than air-conditioned. Categorized into three sets, a total of eight selected design experiments respond to the present urgencies around the air we breathe, the data we exchange, the image we consume through the industrial, mechanical, domestic, and virtual frameworks. Each experiment in this proposed issue is grounded scientifically—simulated, prototyped, and/or built. They resist the symbolic representation of machine and system, rather, they celebrate the interplay between accurate behavior and indeterminate effects. Part technical operations, part theorizing technology through architectural logics, these works serve as design manifestos probing the paradigm shift into possible futures.”
Second prize of $2,000 is awarded to Mark Laverty and Alec McCulloch for their submission “The Haunting of Number 12.” Prompted by the authors’ displacement from their studios during the COVID-19 lockdown, “this project’s site of inquiry is focused on our own shared Victorian terraced house in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Through a forensic investigation of the interior environment, a Derridean process of haunting is used to excavate hidden narratives within the house. Extractive tools such as Lidar scanning, frottage, and calibrated looking devices were deployed to uncover visual disturbances in the house’s fabric, those emerging gaps and distortions became vessels to hold the complex narratives about the house’s history… Through a hauntological approach, the project aims to offer a reflective position on the last 18 months, to explore the difficult realities of displacement in order to reclaim a sense of place.”
Third prize of $1,000 is awarded to Lawrence Blough for his submission “Domestic Mutations in the Age of the Sharing Paradigm.” The project “investigates new types of collective living spaces influenced by emerging social and economic paradigms focused on shared resources. Contesting accepted delineations between work and leisure, nuclear family and post-familial life, four organizations are developed around different co-live and co-work scenarios. Sited within Venice Beach, Los Angeles, the project explores the middle scale between house and housing to question how typology, form, and aesthetics can address the contemporary intersection of private property and shared commons. If the dwelling has always been a preoccupation for architecture’s disciplinary research, then current trends demand the interrogation of the single-family house’s autonomy and contest the habits it has institutionalized in order to discover alternative spatial models.”
Fourth prize of $500 is awarded to Valeria Herrera for her submission “Contested Scapes.” The project consists of images that are “unapologetically visual provocations that envision, through the still out of focus lens of architecture’s future, various possibilities for redefining its unrefined and uneasy relationship with the natural environment. These studies of entangled space, compromised form, emergent identity and atmospheres crafted through the palimpsest of superimposition and erasure, are fundamentally landscapes that aim to trigger the viewer – to force a rupture with one’s own consciousness about space and time and to leave them in a state of delightfully altered consciousness as a way to rethink and reframe how we see, think about and engage the future.”
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all who submitted. Special thanks to our jury: Kenneth Frampton, Architect and Historian, Ware Professor Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP; Steven Holl, Principal, Steven Holl Architects; Kevin Lippert, Founder, Princeton Architectural Press, Publisher, Design Arts Press; Ioannis Oikonomou. Founder, oiio studio; Jennifer Olshin, Partner, Friedman Benda; Andrea Lee Simitch, Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell Department of Art, Architecture, and Planning; Eirini Tsachrelia, Int’l Assoc. AIA, Professor of Architecture.
Pamphlet Architecture was founded in 1978 by architects Steven Holl and William Stout to promote the work of emerging architects, often working outside established boundaries of professional practice, exploring theoretical ideas, documenting building and urban and rural building types, and providing manifestos calling for the architectural world to think broader and design deeper. Many of today’s best-known architects were first published in the Pamphlet format, including Holl himself, Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid, Lars Lerup, Mark Mack, Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid, Livio Dimitriu, and Alberto Sartoris.
Pamphlet Architecture 37 is made possible with the support of Design Arts Press and the Steven Myron Holl Foundation. Awards for the PA37 winners is generously supported by the Steven Myron Holl Foundation.
