League Prize winner
Miles Gertler of Common Accounts
Common Accounts | Closer Each Day: The Architecture of Everyday Death, The Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada, 2020. Image credit: Common Accounts
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.
Miles Gertler of Common Accounts won a 2023 award.
Miles Gertler founded Common Accounts with Igor Bragado in 2016. In its own words, the Toronto- and Madrid-based experimental design studio is “tethered more to networks of peers, politics, and file storage than we are to traditional notions of place and practice.” Through a variety of media, it engages with the everyday—though sometimes taboo—spatial and technological protocols surrounding self-design and the human body. Exploring subjects from fitness and cosmetic surgery to funerals and deathcare, the studio’s bold experimentations push both design and public discourse beyond their comfort zones.
Recent projects include:
- Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a lakeside cabin in the woods of Ontario designed for a queer throuple
- Three Ordinary Funerals, a proposal for a new approach to funerals and human disposition that would expand the ceremonial, ecological, and material possibilities surrounding death and grieving
- FOMO-STOCK, a speculative series of parade floats and pageantry vehicles.
Miles Gertler holds a bachelor’s of architectural studies from University of Waterloo and an MArch from Princeton University. He is an assistant professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and a member of the board of directors of Toronto’s Mercer Union: A Centre for Contemporary Art. In summer 2023, Gertler will be an artist-in-residence at Palazzo Monti in Italy.
Common Accounts’ work has been included in exhibitions around the world, including at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Cube Design Museum in the Netherlands, the Seoul Museum of Art, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. The practice has contributed to the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial.
