League Prize winner
Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann of After Architecture
After Architecture | Tangential Timber, Charlottesville, VA, 2022. Image credit: After Architecture
Established in 1981, the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers is a juried portfolio competition for early-career practitioners in North America, organized around a yearly theme.
Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann of After Architecture won a 2023 award.
Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann founded After Architecture in 2012 as undergraduates at Cornell University. In response to the construction industry’s complicity in the environmental crisis, the Charlottesville, Virginia-based studio advocates for resurfacing and advancing sustainable preindustrial building techniques and materials. Simultaneously low- and high-tech, it pairs emerging computational technologies with locally sourced biogenic materials to produce a distinct formal language “reframing the relationship between biology, technology, and authorship,” in the words of the firm.
Recent projects include:
- Tangential Timber, a research project that develops design methodologies, fabrication techniques, and structural applications for non-linear wood
- Homegrown, an outdoor room at the Knoxville Museum of Art built with landscaping waste and forestry detritus
- Camp Barker Memorial, an entryway to a D.C. public elementary school that memorializes the site’s history as a Civil War contraband camp.
Katie MacDonald holds a BArch from Cornell University and an MArch from Harvard University GSD.
Kyle Schumann holds a BArch from Cornell University and an MArch from Princeton University.
MacDonald and Schumann were 2019–20 Tennessee Architecture Fellows at the University of Tennessee and are 2022–23 Exhibit Columbus University Design Research Fellows. They teach at the University of Virginia.
After Architecture was included in Cultured Magazine’s 2021 Young Architects List and Architect Magazine’s 2019 Next Progressives. Its projects have received awards from Architect Magazine, The Architect’s Newspaper, AIA Virginia, and AIA Los Angeles.
