Assistant Prof Kyle Reynolds and Jeff Mikolajewski, who together form Is-Office, recently received a 2015 Burnham Prize Award for the project  Empty Kingdoms.

Inspired by the title of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial (The State of the Art of Architecture) this year’s Burnham Prize challenged participants to develop a single image that represents a strong point of view that explores the question: What is the State of the Art of Architecture today?

“We are living in a golden age of architectural projects - there are the archivists, the hair guy, the pattern people, the “robots should be tools” people, the “robots should be buildings” people, the grasshopper scripters, the atmospherics, the collage makers, the techno-utopians, the techno-dystopians, the technophiles, the trace people, the new tectonics people, the old tectonics people, the hanging string people, the gooey bubble people, the entrepreneurial talkers who read Fast Company, the techno-fabulists who read Wired, the TED talkers, the people who want trees to be buildings, the surface people, the scary digital people, the Mario digital people, the prefab people, the digifab people, the sustainable people, the socially aware citizens, the Vimeo directors, the Kickstarters, the cross-programmers, the infrastructure crowd, and so on, and so forth.

Like a medieval continent, the discipline of architecture has been divided and subdivided into an ever-expanding number of fiefdoms, each guarded by a greedy aristocrat committed to his role as lord of the land. These landed gentry, who hold property for future gains such as tenure, a curatorial position, or a show at the upcoming biennale, now dominate the discipline. In this world, there are virtually no buildings and there is nothing to protect, just miles and miles of rhetorical fortifications enclosing fallow land and the odd pavilion or installation.

http://www.chicagoarchitecturalclub.org/2015-Burnham-Prize-Awards

The discipline needs a new means to coalesce, by holding a mirror onto itself and abandoning old models of fracture and bifurcation. Instead, these little projects should nest together to form the next big thing.” – Kyle Reynolds and Jeff Mikolajewski.

We congratulate Kyle and Jeff on this great achievement!