Associate Professor Matias del Campo and Assistant Professor of Practice Sandra Manninger of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as their thesis students, have received the 2018 Architect Magazine Studio Prize. The Studio Prize, awarded by Architect Magazine and Sloan, celebrates the most innovative academic architecture studios in North America, offering examples of the ways students may approach design problems in their future careers. A jury selected six studios from the United States and Canada as some of the best examples of architectural investigation taking place in colleges and universities today.

The Taubman College team’s studio, “The New Grand Tour,” speculates about the architecture of CERN’s satellite campus for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). del Campo and Manninger were asked by CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, to develop a studio that speculates about the program, morphology, and location for a future campus located along the Future Circular Collider. The goal was to critically interrogate the typology and morphology of the campus, in collaboration with one of the world’s most advanced scientific communities. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is located in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Though the studio was invested in the forensic examination of the typology of the campus, it was at the same time pushing for the evolution of contemporary sensibilities and means of expression,” said del Campo. “It was crucial to transform the idea of the campus into a frame for possible alternative design ecologies,” added Manninger.

Students in “The New Grand Tour” included Robert Allsop, Daniel Barrios, Ashish Bhandari, Kevin Bukowski, Stephanie Bunt, Westley Josiah Burger, Benny Cruz, Victor Emmanuel Dionisio, Allison Ford, Sung Su Kim, Yongjoon Kim, Feier Lan, Xin Shen, Nathan Michael Wesseldyk, Wei Wu, Dongfang Xie, and Shufan Zhang. Other winners included: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; The Cooper Union, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture; the University of Arizona, College of Architecture, Planning & Landscape Architecture; the University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture; and the University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

This year’s jury of distinguished practitioners and educators included Yolanda Daniels, founding partner of Studio Sumo, Long Island City, NY; Eric Owen Moss, founding principal and lead designer of Eric Owen Moss Architects, Los Angeles; and Jennifer Yoos, FAIA, principal/CEO at VJAA, Minneapolis.

This is the second Architect Magazine Studio Prize award for U-M. The first was awarded to architecture lecturer Dawn Gilpin’s Wallenberg Studio in 2016, the award’s inaugural year.

For more information about the award, visit Architect Magazine Studio Award.