:: Greg Kochanowski, STUFF, Los Angeles; Stephen Roe & Chiafang Wu, ROEWUarchitecture, New York City; Mason White & Lola Sheppard, Lateral Architecture, Ithaca; Dan Hisel, Dan Hisel Design, Cambridge; Tiffany Lin & Mark Oldham, LOO, Boston; Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore & Christine Williams, Interboro, Brooklyn. Previously
The Architectural League is pleased to announce six winners in its twenty-fourth annual competition for young architects and designers. An exhibition of work by the winners will open to the public on May 12 at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City, and will be on display through July 6. The gallery is open weekdays (except Thursdays) and Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of lectures by the winners. Admission to the exhibition is free. Admission to the lectures by winners on May 12, 19, and 26th is free for League members and $10 for non-members.

Competition winners will present their work in slide presentations followed by receptions. All lectures begin at 6:30 and are held at the Urban Center. Reservations are not required. Lecture dates and speakers are as follows:

Thursday, May 12
Greg Kochanowski, STUFF, Los Angeles
Stephen Roe & Chiafang Wu, ROEWUarchitecture, New York City

Thursday, May 19
Mason White & Lola Sheppard, Lateral Architecture, Ithaca
Dan Hisel, Dan Hisel Design, Cambridge

Thursday, May 26
Tiffany Lin & Mark Oldham, LOO, Boston
Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore & Christine Williams, Interboro, Brooklyn

Participants in the Architectural League's annual Young Architects Forum are chosen through a nation-wide competition, announced by a “call for entries” published each fall. Entrants, who must be ten years or less out of undergraduate or graduate school, submit a portfolio containing their work, accompanied by a short text that addresses the competition theme. Winners are selected by a prestigious jury, receive an honorarium, and are invited to exhibit their work and present a lecture at the Urban Center in the spring. Winners' designs will also be on display on the Architectural League's web site, www.archleague.org, and illustrated in a catalogue to be published by Princeton Architectural Press.
The theme for the competition, developed by the Young Architects Committee, changes every year to reflect current issues in architectural design and theory. Recent competition themes have included “If...Then,” “Second Nature,” “Material Process,” “Inhabiting Identity,” and “City Limits.” The committee, a group selected each year from past participants in the Young Architects Forum, also asks distinguished members of the design community to serve with them on the jury. In addition to committee members Eric Bunge, Ben Checkwitch, and Mike Latham, jurors included Iñaki Abalos, James Carpenter, Keller Easterling, and Calvin Tsao.

To critically frame a portfolio illustrating their work, each competition entrant was asked to explain how his or her work responded to the theme “situating.” The theme was linked to the Architectural League's 2004-2005 program theme “Sitegeist: Nature, Memory, Identity,” which explored the growing interest within architectural theory and practice in ideas about site, temporality and indeterminacy, and natural and environmental processes. “Situating” urged competition entrants to consider questions that addressed what constitutes a young architects 'site' in light of the observation that architects increasingly share concepts and techniques with other disciplines, which in turn has created a more dynamic contemporary understanding of site. The committee also asked entrants to consider the 'siting' of the focus of their work--acknowledging the influence of new materials and fabrication techniques on how an architect defines and addresses a design problem. Finally, entrants were asked to consider how these complexities have created a trend toward multidisciplinary design teams and what the implications and possibilities are for “situating work within this spectrum of identities.”

Speaking on Thursday, May 12 the first night of the series and the opening night of the exhibition, will be Greg Kochanowski and Stephen Roe & Chiafang Wu. Based in Los Angeles, Greg Kochanowski is principal of STUFF, founded in 1999. The firm is dedicated to researching complex adapting systems through speculative projects and built work. Kochanowski is currently a faculty member at Otis College of Art and Design, and will be a part-time faculty member in the Fresh-URBS program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), teaching classes on design, technology, and urbanism. Current projects include three house projects in the Los Angeles area and several national and international competitions. Kochanowski was also lead designer at Roger Sherman Architecture and Design for the firm's entries for the Freshkills Landfill to Landscape and Santa Fe Railyard Park competitions. Stephen Roe & Chiafang Wu, who founded ROEWUarchitecture in New York City in 2000, are currently co-holders of the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellowship at Ohio State University. Their practice is dedicated to the integration of digital and building technologies. The firm's work includes Network Structure, a pavilion comprised of node points linked by rigid and structural members all linked by information flows, which won first prize in the Ephemeral Structures for the Athens Olympics competition. Other premiated competition entries include the Tallinn Module and 'Climatic building' for the Far Eastern Digital Design Competition. Current projects include 'Solar Grass Field,' a vertical solar collector and houses in Ireland and Taiwan.

Mason White & Lola Sheppard and Dan Hisel will speak on Thursday, May 19, the second evening of the lecture series. Based in Ithaca, New York, Mason White and Lola Sheppard initiated the collaborative Lateral Architecture in 2002. White currently teaches at Cornell University and serves on the editorial board of Archinect.com. Lateral Architecture is a practice centered on issues of urbanism, infrastructure, and landscape, and was awarded the Howard Lefevre Fellowship from Ohio State University in 2003-2004 for a research project on exurbanism and retailscapes called Flatspace. Current projects include Migratory Lightfield, a roving light installation on the campus of Cornell University, and Soil Horizon, a temporary landscape for the 2005 Metis International Garden Festival in Metis, Quebec. Dan Hisel practices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he concentrates on work that strives to integrate architecture, environment, and bodily experience. His recent project, The Heavy/Light House, won a Progressive Architecture Award Citation and a Boston Society of Architects Award for unbuilt architecture (2003). The Cadyville Sauna, a small structure covered with mirrors and built up against a cliff in Cadyville, New York, explores Hisel's interest in architecture and camouflage, as the building disappears and reflects its wooded surroundings. Hisel's design work has been published in Architecture, Dwell, Architecture Boston, and Assemblage.

Speaking on Thursday, May 20, the final evening of lectures, will be Tiffany Lin & Mark Oldham and
Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore & Christine Williams. Tiffany Lin and Mark Oldham are the founding principals of LOO, a Boston-based collaborative design practice founded in 2003. LOO is engaged in residential projects in the Caribbean and renovation and installation projects in Boston and New York. 8 Container Farmhouse, a 2,500 square-foot residence and office for a shrimp farm manager and his family, utilizes discarded shipping containers as basic living units. The project received a Progressive Architecture Award Citation in 2005. Tiffany Lin and Mark Oldham are also designers at local architecture firms and have taught design studios at the Boston Architectural Center. Interboro is a New York City-based research and design group. Its subject is the extraordinary, exciting complexity of the contemporary city, which it engages through writing, teaching, and professional practice. Interboro recently won the LA Forum's Dead Mall Competition with a proposal to rehabilitate an abandoned shopping mall in Fishkill, NY. Interboro also won first prize for their submission to Shrinking Cities: An International Ideas Competition. Interboro has been published and exhibited widely, including features in Architecture, Metropolis, Lotus International, and Retail Traffic, and exhibitions in Urban Center Galleries, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Deutsches Architektur Zentrum Berlin. The firm has four principals: Tobias Armborst is an architect and urban designer focusing on the interface between urbanism and landscape design. In addition to being a principal of Interboro, Armborst is also a project designer at a New York firm.
Daniel D'Oca is an urban planner and a principal of Interboro. He has worked as a planner for the New York City Department of City Planning as well as a number of other firms. D'Oca is currently working on a book about squatter settlements in and around Rio de Janeiro. Georgeen Theodore, a registered architect and urban designer, is a principal of Interboro and a senior designer at a local New York firm. Theodore also teaches a design studio at New Jersey Institute of Technology's School of Architecture. Christine Williams is an urban planner and writer with expertise in large-scale master planning and the role of culture in urban development. She is a principal of Interboro as well as a planner and project manager at a New York architecture firm.

Since its inception in 1981, the Architectural League's Young Architects Forum has provided many of the leading talents of succeeding new generations of architects and designers a valuable opportunity to present their work and ideas. Winners from the early years of the competition include Ross Anderson, Karen Bausman & Leslie Gill, Neil Denari, Tom Hanrahan & Victoria Meyers, Steven Holl, Carlos Jimenez, Sulan Kolatan & Bill McDonald, Ralph Lerner, Mark Robbins, and Billie Tsien. More recent winners include Architecture Research Office, Sunil Bald & Yolande Daniels, Della Valle + Bernheimer Design, Rick Joy, nArchitects, Shih-Fu Peng & Roisin Heneghan, SERVO, SYSTEMarchitects, Monica Ponce de Leon & Nader Tehrani, and J. Meejin Yoon.

The Architectural League gratefully acknowledges the support of the LEF Foundation, Artemide, Hunter Douglas Window Fashions, Dornbracht, Knoll, and Tischler und Sohn for the Young Architects Forum. League programs are also made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

GENERAL INFORMATION
The Architectural League of New York is an independent forum for the presentation and discussion of creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related design disciplines. Founded in 1881, the League promotes excellence and innovation in architecture and urbanism by furthering the education of architects and designers, and by communicating to a broad audience the importance of architecture in public life. Through an active schedule of programs, the League provides a venue for contemporary work and ideas, identifies and encourages the work of talented young architects, creates opportunities for exploring new approaches to problems in the built environment, and fosters a stimulating community for dialogue and debate.

Telephone: 212-753-1722
Telephone for reservations (members only): 212-980-3767
Fax: 212-486-9173
Web site: www.archleague.org
Email: info@archleague.org

Lecture Admission: $10 for general public, free for members.

Visit the Young Architects Forum Website at www.archleague.org