Submission: February 13, 2022
Registration: February 13, 2022
Language: English
Location: United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Prizes: Cash prize of $2,000
Type: Portfolio competition
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 2022. These events will be either in-person, online, or hybrid, depending on local and national health guidelines this spring. 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 organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects + Designers Committee.
THEME: GROUNDING
Searching for grounding is a sticky, precarious, and stubborn pursuit of our time. In an unpredictable and hybrid world, more focus is needed on how architecture can respond to this condition and how young architects can situate themselves within it.
Through grounding, designers come to terms with complex material realities, sociocultural contingencies, and more fundamental ways of being. Although grounding suggests locality, contemporary environments are invariably embedded in global systems that complicate architecture’s relationship with place. Grounding thus means, on one hand, making vital connections to what is already there—materially, socially, and otherwise—and, on the other, contending with placeless, pervasive processes. Navigating the remote and embodied, the nonlocal and local, architecture requires methods of retooling, reappropriation, and transformation to find its grounding.
Engaging with what precedes and underlies, grounding is also about establishing productive contexts for action and bringing design into new orbits of collaboration. Such messy interdependencies pull architecture toward the ground, urging designers to consider contingencies as resources for practice.
This year’s Architectural League Prize reflects on the substance of design’s foundations. How do young architects tether their work and practices to the grounds upon which they design? How can designers respond to both the particularities of location and the ubiquity of global forces? What are intentional approaches to and forms of grounding?
