Young architects and designers are invited to submit work to the annual Architectural League Prize Competition. Projects of all types, either theoretical or real, and executed in any medium, are welcome. The jury will select work for presentation in lectures, digital media, and an exhibition in June 2019. Winners will receive a cash prize of $2,000.
Established in 1981 to recognize visionary work by young practitioners, The Architectural League Prize is an annual competition, lecture series, and exhibition led by the League and its Young Architects + Designers Committee.
Theme: Just
The idea that an architectural work might be just—whether formally, materially, contextually, culturally, or otherwise—invokes the diverse and interdependent concerns that shape contemporary practice. In its myriad references, Just explores the implicit tensions between architecture’s affinity for the just so in materials, tectonics, and organization, and a call to act justly.
Escalating conditions of sociopolitical turmoil and environmental calamity have prompted renewed attention to the ethics of architecture. How might architecture serve justice? Confront complex challenges across scales, mediums, and geographies? Build new equitable paradigms for action? Can architecture engage a breadth of constituencies, environments, and species? In an era of global turbulence, how might architecture’s ends justify the means? Can architects advocate for architectural excellence and beauty while still addressing social concerns? Can just architecture, with its laborious process from conceptualization to construction, become a justified statement in itself?
Just explores architectural action with the understanding that a multiplicity of coexisting and contradictory attitudes may be constructive, liberating, and justified. This year’s Architectural League Prize competition asks entrants to consider the just in how they approach the practice of architecture, whether through experimentation in research and design advocacy or by advancing speculative and applied techniques within the discipline.
The competition is open only to current full-time residents, who need not be citizens, of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Submissions for the Architectural League Prize are open until February 11, 2019. More information is available here.