Exhibit Columbus has announced the winners of the 2018-2019 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize competition. The five winning firms will be featured in the Docomomo US and Exhibit Columbus 2018 National Symposium, titled Design, Community, and Progressive Preservation, taking place September 26 through 29. Firms will then return on January 19 to present their design concepts to the community. Each firm is tasked with constructing site-responsive installations that interact with Columbus’s midcentury modern heritage, with the final works opening to the public on August 24, 2019. This is the second year that the Miller Prize has been awarded. Here are the five winning firms:
With work that ranges from the Chicago Riverwalk to a two-year examination of the post-Hurricane Sandy landscape, Cambridge-based Agency has a deep commitment to ecological and social mindfulness. Agency is currently leading the White River Vision Plan, a year-long strategic plan for redeveloping 58 miles of southern Indiana river.
New York-based Bryony Roberts Studio uses design to bring intangible heritage and social histories to contemporary audiences, often through distinctive collaborations. As a participant in the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Bryony Roberts brought the South Shore Drill Team to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center for an electrifying performance that used careful choreography to mirror the lines of the iconic modernist plaza.
Fresh off her commission to design the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, Mexico City-based Frida Escobedo creates sophisticated structural forms using vernacular materials and methods, including concrete block, brise-soleil, and post and beam.
Based in Boston, and Kigali, Rwanda, non-profit MASS Design Group believes that architecture is never neutral, and that it has the power to heal. The firm’s work includes both research and design. This spring MASS Design Group unveiled the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
With work that creates “structures that establish new cultures, institutions, and relationships,” New York-based SO-IL created L’air pour l’air for the second Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2017, a project that brought the firm to the Garfield Park Conservatory, where they encased an ensemble of wind instrument players in air-filtering mesh enclosures, designed to clean the air through breathing.
