League Prize 2024: Lola Ben-Alon, Strat Coffman

In this video, Lola Ben-Alon of The Natural Materials Lab and Strat Coffman discuss their practices and projects, followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A with 2024 Young Architects + Designers Committee member Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman. Escandón Cesarman is a founding principal of the Mexico City-based studio APRDELESP.

The Natural Materials Lab, founded and directed by Lola Ben-Alon, investigates raw, earth, and fiber-based building materials across scales, from fabrication research and design/build projects to policy proposals and installations. The Lab, located at Columbia University GSAPP, unites experimental research with Ben-Alon’s teaching practice. Integrating emergent technologies with historical techniques, the Natural Materials Lab leverages material experimentation to “imagine and invent socially equitable and ecologically sustainable futures,” in the studio’s own words.

Trained as an architect, Strat Coffman’s work explores the concept of “the embodied subject as an agitator of design,” in the designer’s own words. Currently located in both Ann Arbor and Los Angeles, Coffman’s practice incorporates installation, set pieces, guerrilla performance, and wearable garments. Their provocative objects and installations engage the live body, often tactilely, in new orientations toward systems of design such as building codes and generic products, inviting, in Coffman’s words, “misinterpretation, readjustment, and misuse.”