DRAWINGS' playful dining table installation is named the winner of the 2023 Ragdale Ring Competition

The 2023 winner of the Ragdale Ring competition has been revealed as DRAWINGS, a three-year-old studio founded by Harvard GSD alums Daniel Garcia and William Smith.

Their winning entry for the competition’s 11th overall edition titled Garden Room Table Room proposed a sculptural dining room table installation based on Carie Mae Weems’ influential "Kitchen Table Series" with space for performances and other kinds of interactions using resident artists.

Each chair in the set features exaggerated proportions, producing what the pair say are "intimate spatial conditions" that can be reconfigured depending on the event or audience size. The work evokes the congregational visiting artists' salons that were in fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries and was made in response to the competition brief for a "Theater of the Intimate."

DRAWINGS describes itself as a "bi-coastal operation" split between Brooklyn and Portland that was "always intended to operate out of two very different contexts in order to leverage their unique advantages."

The Ragdale Foundation describes: "Many of the duo’s speculative collaborations challenge normative material and typological trends in architecture, expand architecture’s influence in addressing cultural and environmental issues through physical form, and produce objects meant to engage and subtly provoke."

They will now travel to Lake Forest, Illinois to prepare the work as part of an 18-day residency in which they will build and document their winning design. This year marks the first time in the competition’s history that the pavilion will be situated on the original Ragdale Ring site, a feat which made the foundation's artistic director Regin Igloria promise they are "returning to some of the central tenants of Howard Van Doren Shaw and his vision of what an outdoor theater might be."

The pair follows last year's winning entry from Syracuse University alums [Sic.] + fieldtrip. More information about the competition's past winners can be found here.