EDGE Alum Leah Wulfman Wins 2024 Architectural League Prize

SCI-Arc is thrilled to announce that alum Leah Wulfman (MA Fiction and Entertainment ’18) has just been announced as the winner of the prestigious 2024 Architectural League Prize. The Prize is an annual competition, lecture series, and exhibition organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee, drawing entries from across North America.

Established in 1981, the League Prize, open to architects and designers ten years or less out of a bachelor’s or master’s degree program, is one of North America’s (USA/Canada/Mexico) most prestigious awards for young practitioners. Winners are chosen through a portfolio competition juried by distinguished architects, artists, and critics, whose lectures and installations provide a lively public forum for the discussion of their work and ideas. The selection committee, comprised of past League Prize honorees, also chooses the year’s theme and jurors.

 League Prize winners will present their work through online lectures, digital media, interviews, and an online exhibition opening June 11.

Of being selected as winner, Wulfman shared in a statement: “I am hyped to be a recipient of the Architectural League Prize—I am a queer, disabled, and trans architect; a teacher, forever student, and kid, playfully crossing the boundaries of architecture, spatial technology, and game design.

“Design can never be a solo endeavor and story, and creativity is always an act of collaboration with the world and with others. I have been making and swimming along with colleagues, mentors, the many students I have worked and grown with, my friends, my lover, my chosen and biological families, and anyone who has made time and space.

“Up the things you care about, your loves, your obsessions, what makes you feel for real, find your design family, your buds, and mentors; push yourself. Recognize your agency as a designer without falling for prescribed and closed worlds, givens, and architectures,” they continued.

“Even if you believe such a prize to be out of your league or not quite in alignment with your approach to spatial design and storytelling, please know that architecture and prizes like these need you and designers coming from backgrounds, experiences, and spaces of multiplicity.”

Leah Wulfman holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Master of Arts in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc (’18). They have taught at numerous institutions in the United States, including ArtCenter's Media Design Practices Graduate Program, IDEAS Program at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, SCI-Arc, The School of Architecture at Taliesin, and most recently University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where they have developed youth programming and mixed reality coursework. Wulfman is now at the University of Utah's College of Architecture and Planning, where they are currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design (MDD).

Wulfman is a Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. Trained as an architect, Wulfman has been assembling hybrid virtual and physical spaces in order to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, they are presently working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions, and materials.

Wulfman’s work develops nonnormative uses and playful misuses of technology through embodied physicality. Much of this work is centered around play and performativity, and pairs game engine interactions and digital twins with their most physical, material, and ludic counterparts–dirt, weeds, trash, plastic, and foam. These mixed reality ecologies and interactions find their foundations in disability, trans and queer embodied practice and politics, and operate as lenses to reconfigure and recontextualize space and time orientations in architectural discourse beyond the normative. Wulfman refers to what they do as non-binary tech, which might elucidate Mixed Reality as not simply THE NEXT BIG THING but a method of working that undercuts binary assumptions of gender and physicality, as well as technology.