Book: ‘Young Architects 13’

Young Architects 13: It’s Different highlights the work of the six winners of the 2011 Architectural League Prize, who seem to hover around the new role of the designer in a post-bust economy. Their contributions range from the fluidity of capturing melting ice cores (by Future Cities Lab) to the rigidity of tangram-esque geometries (from William O’Brien Jr.)—speculations that could only materialize from a climate of uncertainty. Anne Rieselbach, program director of the Architectural League, writes, “difference provides opportunities for invention.” And that invention is evident in the winners’ work, as with Catie Newell’s interventions with abandoned buildings in Detroit, or with Nameless (Unchung Ma & Sorae Yoo) who presents a series of projects inspired by fishbowl studies. Also represented are various performative-skin systems by Form-ula (Ajmal Aqtash, Richard Sarrach, & Tamaki Uchikawa). Each prize winner has, in effect, a mini-monograph in this annual compilation that adds up to a summary of what design looks like in times of change. • $24.95; Princeton Architectural Press, May 2012.