The Architectural League of New York has honored two members of the School of Architecture and Planning community with its annual prize for young architects and designers.
Design Earth, a collaborative practice led by MIT Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, and The Open Workshop, the practice of Neeraj Bhatia SM '07, are two of six architecture and design offices selected for the 2016 prize. The award is given to architects and designers who are no more than 10 years out of school.
Ghosn and Jazairy, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, founded Design Earth in 2010. Their work investigates the geographies of technological systems, such as energy and trash, to open a range of aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.
They have exhibited their work at a number of venues; this year they will take part in the Kuwaiti Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture and the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale.
Ghosn and Jazairy are founding editors of the journal New Geographies; both hold doctorates of design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
The Open Workshop was founded in 2011 by Bhatia, who received a masters of science in architecture studies, with a focus on architecture and urbanism, from MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning in 2007.
Based in San Francisco, Bhatia’s studio is dedicated to reconciling architecture with the evolving and indeterminate conditions of the city, its public sphere, and its ecological context through reevaluation of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work.”
Bhatia is an assistant professor of architecture at the California College of the Arts, where he co-directs the Urban Works Agency. He is also research director of The Petropolis of Tomorrow, a project that examines the relationship between urbanism and resource extraction.
The award winners were selected by a jury of architects, artists, and critics, based on a portfolio submission. This year’s theme, (im)permanence, “asked how time affects architecture’s assertion of style, methods of assembly, and relationship to program, thus altering our expectations of permanent structures in an impermanent environment.”
The other recipients of the 2016 award are: Juan Alfonso Garduño Jardón of G3 Arquitectos; Neyran Turan and Mete Sonmez of NEMESTUDIO; Hubert Pelletier and Yves de Fontenay of Pelletier de Fontenay; and Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest of Ultramoderne.
Ghosn and Bhatia will present lectures on June 28 and take part in an exhibition at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at The New School’s Parsons School for Design in New York from June 29 to July 30.
