League Prize Winner Bio
First Office
First Office
The League Prize, an annual competition that asks young designers to respond to a given theme, has marked an important milestone in many architects’ careers. Winners showcase their work through a lecture series and exhibition.
Anna Neimark & Andrew Atwood were winners of the 2015 competition.
Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood founded Los Angeles, California-based First Office in 2011. The practice covers a variety of scales, from furniture design to building headquarters, landscape interventions, and conceptual installations.
Past projects include Possible Table, Possible Mediums, an exhibition at Taubman College, University of Michigan; Paranormal Panorama, a temporary screening room for the film Kalte Probe, directed by Constanze Ruhm at the MAK Center, Mackey Garage Top in Los Angeles; and Pinterest Headquarters in San Francisco, a 45,000-sf office space conversion done in collaboration with the project designers all of the above.
Ongoing projects include Nine Essays, a book of essays and projects by Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood, recently published by the Graham Foundation Treatise Press in Chicago; One-Room House, a residential commission in Los Angeles; and Shotgun House, Lexington, Kentucky, a Phase II finalist of the LuigART Maker Spaces Competition in 2014, and also exhibited at the Graham Foundation’s Treatise: Why Write Alone? in Chicago in 2015.
First Office’s project Peak on Peak, a study that uses the grid to deconstruct the form of a pyramid, received Honorable Mention for Think Space Past Forward Competition in 2012. Their conceptual project The Grid won Honorable Selection and was displayed in The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan exhibition organized by The Architectural League and the Museum of the City of New York in 2011. Zoopol, which explores connections between the concept of a city and the animal kingdom, received Honorable Mention in the Think Space Ecological Borders Competition in 2011.
Anna Neimark earned a B.A. in Architecture from Princeton University and a M.Arch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Andrew Atwood earned a B.A. from the University of Richmond and a M.Arch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Neimark is a full-time faculty member at SCI-Arc and Atwood is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley.