League Prize Winner Bio
Architecture Office
Jonathan Louie and Nicole McIntosh
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.
Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie were winners of the 2017 competition.
Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie founded Architecture Office in 2015. “Part practice and part observation,” the firm’s projects attempt to “support architecture’s unique capacity to not be static and singular, but, to simultaneously engage and refresh the real-time value of the things around it.”
Architecture Office created Big Will and Friends, an installation and performance realized in Syracuse in 2016 and Eindhoven, The Netherlands in 2017. “Big Will” refers to an affectionately named shotgun house-style pavilion whose facades were fretted with a floral pattern mimicking Morris & Co.’s thistle wallpaper, which was also applied to a nearby wall. The firm aimed to “blur the point where representation ends and material matter begins.” McIntosh and Louie enlisted modern dance troupes costumed with the matching pattern to perform alongside the installation resulting in an exploration of the relationships between static and moving things. The event and workshop Parti Wall (2014) contained nine individual installations erected by student and mentor teams inside a gridded floorplan partitioned into a grid. The exercise challenged participant designers to “negotiate boundaries that define their respective spaces” while co-constructing the walls that define their neighbors’ installation. The duo is currently working on House in House, a single-family home encased in an outer shell of an existing log cabin, which will begin construction in fall 2017 in Lake Walker, Washington.
Jonathan Louie obtained a Master of Architecture degree from UCLA, where he also received a 2×8 Award sponsored by the AIA Los Angeles. Louie was awarded a fellowship residency at The MacDowell Colony, which he completed in fall 2015. He currently teaches at Syracuse University School of Architecture.
Nicole McIntosh received both a Bachelor of Architecture degree and a Master of Architecture degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). She currently teaches at Syracuse University School of Architecture and has lectured at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. In 2014-15 she was a Teaching Fellow at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.