Competition / 2015 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers: Authenticity / The Architectural League of New York

Call for Entries 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. 

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: Authenticity 

Historically, authenticity was contingent on the value of originality, intimating the significance of an origin. Before advancements in technical reproduction challenged this stability, an original was easy to distinguish. For the Greeks, copying took only two forms: stamping and casting – everything else was considered an original. Today, this is no longer a stable dichotomy, and the contingency is decoupling. Sampling, appropriating, hacking, and copying are among our contemporary modes of creative production. Like photography, digital platforms present us with devices, tools, and methods in which copies can be made indistinguishable from originals. 

Further, parametric and generative design strategies have offered alternative design methods whose very nature challenge the notion of origin and copy through the investigation of the interrelationships of parts to their wholes, and emergent self-organized pattern systems at multiple scales and applications. Consequently, we are presented with an infinite number of variegated parts or objects that are of a continuous series. Similarly, disciplinary boundaries continue to be transformed in the presence of inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborative processes, where authorship can be viewed as horizontal and pluralistic. 

Recent advances in computation, visualization, material intelligence, and fabrication technologies have begun to alter fundamentally our theoretical understanding of general design principles as well as the architect’s role and practical approach towards architecture and research. In light of these realities we seek proposals that cultivate new positions of authenticity within architecture. The path to obtaining an original voice involves authenticating these positions. We want to see authenticity as a pursuit rather than a form of validation or an essential quality. We are interested in how design, technology, and practice challenge authenticity and the ways that originality, expression, and authorship continue to be pursued. How do we situate these new conceptual frameworks? Thus, submissions might re-examine authenticity through form, design, substance, function, context, or any other means that continue to direct and transform your practice.