League Prize winner

Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic of HANNAH

HANNAH | Ashen Cabin, Ithaca, NY, 2019. Image credit: Andy Chen.

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.

Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic of HANNAH won a 2020 award.

Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic founded HANNAH, based in Ithaca, New York, in 2014. Digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to their work, which ranges in scale from 3D printed concrete architectural elements to seating and a recently completed small cabin. They describe their work’s structural performance and architectural expression as “inherently derived from materiality, digital construction protocols, robotic routines, and bottom-up design logics.”

Current and recent projects include: 

  • Ashen Cabin, a small building 3D printed from concrete and clothed in a robotically fabricated Structural Insulated Panel (SIP) envelope sliced from irregular Ash trees.
  • RRRolling Stones 2.0, concrete seating constructed using a large-scale open-source 3D printer for The Momentary, a contemporary art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.
  • Additive Architectural Elements, a project utilizing the corbelled layering of 3D-printed concrete to suggest new strategies for building with prototypical architectural elements such as columns, windows, and walls.

Lok holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MArch from MIT, as does Zivkovic, who also holds a Vordiplom from the University of Stuttgart. Both are assistant professors at Cornell University.

Lok and Zivkovic received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 ACSA Faculty Design Award. In 2018 they were recognized in Architect Magazine’s Next Progressive series, won the Architectural League and Socrates Sculpture Park’s Folly/Function competition, and had a solo exhibition, A New Robotic Brutalism – Additive Architectural Elements, at the Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston, MA.

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