Architecture Year End Show Competition Winners Announced

The Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design have announced the winners of the proposal competition for the annual Year End Show, YES24. Winners were chosen by a committee chaired by Visiting Assistant Professor Matthew Allen. The competition offers students the experience of designing and curating an exhibition from its earliest stages, to hands-on installation, to celebrating the opening.

Box-Within-a-Box
Cody Heller, MArch ’24, won the graduate competition with his intriguing box-within-a-box exhibition design. Heller wrote that this is “often used within curatorial practice for being synonymous with isolated conditions of intense contemplation or curation.” His proposal alters Steinberg Gallery from its usual warmly lit state to a darkened, glowing box, which he described as lab-like and similar to an incubator: “a machine providing space for brewing this next generation of architectural ideas and discourse.”

The works included in the exhibition will include a wide variety of projects created throughout the degree programs. “The individual work is given its own defined space for independent celebration while keeping it in dialogue within the greater body of work. Glowing podiums of design artifacts are carefully positioned in the center of three spatial bays and become a kind of melting pot of curiosities where broader comparisons and relationships can be discovered,” Heller wrote.

Projected Folds
Jiahe Jin, BS ’25; Nuo Xu, BS ’26; and Yiwei Shi, BS ’26 won the undergraduate competition for their “Projected Folds” proposal. Their inspiration began with the idea of unfolding the side of a cube. From there, the cube became a basic unit that could be unfolded and arranged in different ways, then placed in the gallery to create a field of objects.

“Each unfolded square unit went through the operation of axonometric projection, and its form was put together with its orthogonal originals,” they wrote, resulting in a description of “a dimension that could not be perceived by our human eyes.” The team further explained how they find the axonometric dimension to be essential for architecture, as it allows for a completely abstract description of an object.

“Projected Folds” emphasizes variations created from the smallest unit, in turn showcasing each student’s unique work. “We wonder if the proposal could serve as an inquiry to our fellow architecture peers,” the team wrote. “How do we position ourselves in facing our physical reality and the theoretical, metaphorical, and abstract space?” They also remarked on the sense of collective achievement that mounting the exhibition would bring to the class.

YES24, the annual year-end exhibition of student work in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design programs, will open in May 2024 at WashU’s Sam Fox School. More details are forthcoming.