The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers: Housekeeping

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. The jury will select work for presentation in lectures, digital media, and an exhibition in June 2021. If COVID-19 restrictions are required, the exhibition and lectures might shift to a digital format. Winners will receive a cash prize of $2,000. 

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. Learn more about past winners of The Architectural League Prize here. 

THEME: HOUSEKEEPING 

Stay-at-home orders have prompted many of us to see our domestic settings anew, and to consider the various ways in which we “keep house.” The term “housekeeping” involves restoring the home to its ideal state by scrubbing, disinfecting, and decluttering its surfaces. It evokes the comfort of the familiar, the excitement of the new. For some people, layers of dust went unnoticed until their living rooms had to double as workplaces. In other cases, household chores have provided respite from digital devices that require their own form of upkeep to optimize performance. Housekeeping implies oversight and control, maintenance and responsibility. It is as much a necessity as it is a ritual: An act of labor, but also an act of care. That said, it is impossible to think about housekeeping without considering its constitutive role in systemic oppression on the basis of gender, race, and class.

Architecture has been complicit in social, ecological, and economic crises that demand immediate attention. How should we think about the maintenance of our disciplinary home? What is it about the way designers work that we’re so desperate to maintain, preserve, and protect? Architecture is invested in appearances—how we present ourselves and our work—but for whom and why? Could we redirect our efforts toward caring for ourselves, one another, and the environment? How might we have more regard for the actors and agents whose care and labor manifest the appearances we strive for? Is now the appropriate time to housekeep how we housekeep? If and when the dust settles, how do we work together to clean up the mess? Our profession is overdue for some housekeeping. 

For more information, visit archleague.org/competition/lp21.