No Precedent banner (courtesy of the competition website)

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 public fora, an on-line installation, podcasts, and in an exhibition in June 2012. Winners will receive a cash prize of $1,000.

A catalogue of winning work will be published by the Architectural League and Princeton Architectural Press. The Architectural League Prize is an annual competition, series of lectures, and exhibition organized by the Architectural League and its Young Architects + Designers Committee. The Prize (formerly known as the Young Architects Forum) was established to recognize specific works of high quality and to encourage the exchange of ideas among young people who might otherwise not have a forum.

Theme: No Precedent

You’re not new and you aren’t different. You’re definitely not shocking and you are full of bullshit. You just don’t fit in. You’re on the brink but they just don’t understand. You’re unbelievable. You are without precedent. Driven by the desire to create, to be heard, to keep busy or to fulfill untapped and forbidden niches, young architects are a self-defining generation. They are unwilling to wait their turn or to follow in footsteps. It has become normative for young architects to cast aside unfit precedents, codes, rules, and primitives, restlessly defining their projects, their problems, their methodologies, their users, and their spaces of intervention. Their work becomes uncategorizable, suggestive, and speculative; it’s on the brink. It’s neither here nor there, but fodder for the future. It is risky traveling in uncharted waters.

What does it take to create and support something without precedent? What must be constructed in order to convincingly communicate an idea? How do these new territories influence the way we work and what we produce? Inherent to the realization of these ideas is the willingness to work, to test again and again, negotiate, and work through problems: mockups, models, tests, prototypes become essential.

Ideas, works, and methodologies that are unfounded, ungrounded, and suspect are of interest here: the things no one has done before, and that one has little experience with. How do you build it? How do you permit it? How do you draw it? How do you talk about it? How do you write about it? How do you think about it? How do you erase it? How do you make it unknown? How is it unprecedented?

For more information: Architecture League