Alumni Seung Teak Lee (MArch ’09) and Mi Jung Lim (MArch ’09) are STPMJ and were announced today as recipients of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. The Prize is one of North America’s most prestigious awards for young architects.
STPMJ is an interdisciplinary architectural practice founded in 2009 by Seung Teak Lee and Mi Jung Lim based in Brooklyn, New York. Their designs evolve from careful observations of material, structure, program and typology, expanding to social, cultural, political, environmental, and economic conditions of our time. STPMJ provides distinctive design packages to develop designs at different scales ranging from furniture to urban infrastructure. Continually embracing new parameters, STPMJ’s solution is process, not product.
The Prize is an annual portfolio competition organized by the Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee. The committee, a group selected each year from past winners of the League Prize, is responsible for developing the program’s theme and selecting competition jurors.
This year’s theme, No Precedent, reflects the committee’s perception of young architects’ careers as “suggestive, speculative, and on the brink.” The committee called for “ideas, works, and methodologies that are unfounded, ungrounded, and suspect…the things no one has done before, and that one has little experience with.” Open to designers ten years or less out of school, the competition draws entrants from around North America. Winners of the Award will lecture in June and display their work in an exhibition on view through the summer. Their work will also be published in the Young Architects series, jointly published by Princeton Architectural Press and the Architectural League, and their ideas will be distributed by the League in podcasts and original interviews.