Lyceum Competition

During the Fall of 2009 I was lucky to be enrolled in a studio competing for The Lyceum Fellowship. Celebrating its 25th year with the 2010 competition, the Lyceum Fellowship is an annual design competition open to a select number of schools around the country. The location and program change every year, chosen by a distinguished professional architect and juried by a panel of professionals and academics in the architectural field. This year's program author was Steven Ehrlich of Ehrlich Architects. The program was to design a community center in the city of Abuja, Nigeria. 15 schools participated, and the results come out sometime this week (though i do know i did not place). The first place prize is $12,000 to spend six months traveling abroad. Second place is $7,000 for three months abroad and third place is $1,500 for whatever the student chooses. There are also honorable mentions and citations that are awarded for outstanding efforts. I did not post this earlier because the competition format is a six-week design phase. Our studio had our six weeks in the fall, but the deadline for submission was one week ago so presumably there were teams working up until March on the same competition.

Below are images from my final submission. The required format was 7 pages in an 11 x 17 layout. This was an incredibly rewarding exercise for many reasons, some of which i would like to get in to in some future posts. For now, just the submission as it was sent and reviewed by the jury:

[the above text] This design is a celebration and architectural reaction to the limitless variation in human beings. It is made for individuals of a community with immeasurable uniqueness, personality and diversity. It serves not as a calculated placement of gathering spaces, but rather as a series of interruptions in the earth’s surface through which spaces exist uniquely in time and in place. The monolithic, finite interruptions are physically defined by formal qualities of material and dimension. They are armatures that facilitate the creation of a forever-changing response to the environmental conditions of light, sound, soil, rain and wind.

The monoliths outline communities by acting as markers, denoting edges and scribing paths; they cluster and stand alone like different members of a community. They are powerful, present, and on a scale appropriate to the ambitions of a growing international city. While establishing presence for the site, they intentionally hold no programmatic elements. They serve as a reference to the strength of this community, the people who gather on its grounds. Every interruption of earth’s surface provides the opportunity for essential. human. community. space.