League Prize winner
Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates
New Affiliates | Tunbridge Winter Cabin, Tunbridge, Vermont, 2017. Image credit: Michael Vahrenwald / Esto.
The League Prize is an annual competition that has been organized by The Architectural League since 1981. Open to designers ten years or less out of school, it draws entrants from around North America.
Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates won a 2020 award.
Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb founded their New York City-based firm in 2016. Relating this year’s theme, Value, to their firm’s emphasis on re-use for projects including installations, pavilions, and residential projects, the partners describe how they “scavenge for parts to reconstruct fragments, surfaces, and forms out of byproducts; to find hidden moments of value and invent new visual languages and disciplinary tools along the way.”
Recent and current projects include:
- Garden Test Beds, an ongoing research and design-build initiative in collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to recycle architectural mockups as public infrastructure.
- Turnbridge Winter Cabin, a small painting studio in the Green Mountains of Vermont whose form draws on the tradition of the area’s clustered aggregate structures.
- Drywall is Forever, a performance and installation for Performa 19 using discarded drywall pieces gathered from museums and galleries around the city to build a new white cube gallery.
Diamantopoulou holds a diploma in architecture from University of Patras, in Greece, and an MArch from Princeton University. She is a visiting critic at Syracuse University and visiting lecturer at Princeton University.
Kolb holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a master of urban planning from the London School of Economics, and an MArch from Princeton University. He is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University GSAPP and a visiting critic at Syracuse University.
New Affiliates was a 2020 winner of the AIA New York New Practices Award and was selected for the AN Interior Top 50 awards in 2018 and 2019. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions including “Rejected: Architectural Drawings and Their Stories” at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture and “44 Low-Resolution Houses” at the Princeton University School of Architecture.
Learn more:
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- “From Playful Products to Clever Urban Interventions, New Affiliates Distills Design to Its Essence,” Metropolis, 2019.
- “For New Affiliates, an aesthetic of imperfection and openness,” The Architect’s Newspaper, 2018.
- Next Progressives profile, Architect, 2018.
