The 2024 Forge Prize

Three finalists are going head-to-head for the $10,000 grand prize--live on YouTube!

Will the winner be a stunning steel space frame? A series of glass boxes that seem to hang in the sky? A sustainable shade system that uses steel tubes for water capture?

Only one of these visions will win the 2024 Forge Prize!

Tune in live at youtube.com/aisc on March 5 at 1:00 p.m. Central to watch the finalists present their ideas to the judges.

The Forge Prize is presented annually by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) to celebrate emerging architects, architecture educators, and graduate students who create visionary designs that embrace steel as the primary structural component.

These three finalists have each taken home $5,000 from the first round. They are working with a steel fabricator to refine their concepts before presenting them to the judges live on YouTube. At stake: the $10,000 grand prize and an invitation to present before an audience of the industry’s best minds at NASCC: The Steel Conference!

About the Designs

One team imagined a public art pavilion at the beginning of the Razorback Greenway, a bike and multi-use trail that spans nearly 50 miles in Northwest Arkansas. The Mile Zero pavilion leverages a spin-valence system that turns a flat sheet of steel into a structural space frame made of a single part with inherent joints, streamlining the construction process.

Mile Zero is a collaboration between Emily Baker, Vincent Edwards, and Edmund Harriss of the University of Arkansas; Princeton University’s Isabel Moreira de Oliveira; West Virginia University’s Eduardo Sosa; and Fayetteville, Ark.-based artist Reilly Dickens-Hoffman.

Mile Zero

Community Art Center

MUSUMANOCO’s Chen Xia imagined a dynamic community art center for Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

The concept of a public building that is connected and open to the neighborhood takes form as glass boxes in the air. A tectonic joinery assembly detail takes advantage of steel’s properties to create a grid structural system for efficient construction.

Juan Jose Castellon of Rice University submitted an installation created in collaboration with Rice’s School of Architecture, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Shepherd School of Music, with the support of the Carbon Hub Initiative.

The modular system uses a system of steel tubes and hollow ceramic pieces to provide cooling shade while capturing rainwater for irrigation on urban rooftops and public areas.

Building Ecologies

Get Updates

Sign up here to receive the latest news and updates about The Forge Prize. We’ll provide news on submission deadlines, guidelines to follow, and works of inspiration to fuel your design thinking.