Clemson architecture alumni win prestigious Architectural League Prize

Partners of Place (PoP), a design collective comprised of alumni from Clemson University and Roger Williams University, recently was named as one of the 2024 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers winners.

Rayshad Dorsey, Joseph James, Julian Owens and Michael Urueta, alumni of Clemson’s School of Architecture, alongside Diego Zubizarreta Otero, an alumnus of Roger William’s University, established Partners of Place in 2023, as a research, ideation and design collective that focuses on issues of social and environmental equity.

The collective submitted projects along the 2024 competition theme, “Dirty,” which asked entrants to “look beyond their presentations of professionalism, respectability and expertise … to expose the forces that shape design practice, projects, modes of representation and communication.”

According to The Architectural League of New York, The League Prize is “an annual competition, lecture series, and exhibition organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects and Designers Committee… Winners are chosen through a portfolio competition juried by distinguished architects, artists and critics, including the Young Architects and Designers Committee.”

The collective proposed interventions to the built environment, specifically focusing on “dirty” physical and social infrastructures that were influenced by the social sciences, using data visualization, historical mapping and storytelling to amplify underrepresented or marginalized communities, their stories and their narratives.

“It’s architectural placemaking for culturally marginalized communities,” explained Owens. “It’s using architecture as an advocacy tool, a bit more than, you know, just beautiful spaces, but also just advocating for communities that need advocacy.”

infra: Addressing the needs of marginalized communities

Their submission, titled “infra,” addressed the needs of marginalized communities in four parts. Part I contextualized the work as a whole, converting data points into visualization and research. Part II, SXCO: The Sex Workers’ Co-Op, championed the empowerment of sex workers through a space shaped by their input and desires, working to normalize and provide safe sex work conditions, advocacy, rights and empowerment. Part III, The Johnny Rittenhouse Jr. Disco + House Music Museum + Southern American AIDS Memorial, highlights the role and relationship that infrastructure, architecture and place-making play in justice, equity and liberation for Black and queer populations, specifically examining the role that racialized socioeconomic inequity, wealth inequity and political regionality play in increasing health disparity for Black queer populations. Finally, Part IV, Patchwork, investigated the relationship of Black Americans within southern agriculture, specifically across the Lowcountry of South Carolina, and reframed that relationship to recenter the construction of community and economy.

“All of our projects look at that kind of underbelly of what secures a population of people within a space,” said James. “What allows [people] to build and establish community? We’re in this area of kind of this remigration back to the South for a lot of black populations, and we’re asking, how can we sort of facilitate that with an architectural vernacular.”

Nontraditional designing

“I think that’s what honestly excited me the most about the fact that we won,” shared Owens. “It’s not even that we won that’s exciting to me. It’s the fact that a lot of these conversations around marginalized communities are conversations that a lot of us have been having for years, and we just never had the opportunity to work together on something much more concrete.”

Partners of Place’s work was created through a unique, nontraditional way of working. Traditionally, a firm would work together in the same building to create high-caliber architecture and design work. However, each member of Partners of Place is located in a different part of the U.S., so all the work the collective created was done remotely.

“I think the jury was probably equally interested in the remote nature of how we worked,” James said. “I think our ability to kind of riff digitally, where we can leverage certain [digital] tools and start to almost draw in parallel and move in the same way, was a very organic way of working. Almost like we were drawing on the same piece of paper at the same time, which you can’t necessarily do in person.”