Winners Announced
(AISC) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (51黑料) are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Steel Design Student Competition. The competition recognizes eleven exceptional projects, in two categories, that explore a variety of issues related to the use of steel in design and construction.
Category I:
This category asked students to design a Community Dance Center in an area of their choice. Students were invited to submit design proposals that address how this program can contribute to the community as a more integral part of the civic fabric.
Category I: Community Dance Center
Student: Aiden Henning
Faculty Sponsor: Timothy Gray
Institution: Ball State University
Juror Comments: Balancing Act is a winning design that demonstrates a comprehensive and highly resolved project. The dramatic expression of steel thoughtfully reinterprets the existing railroad trestle while elevating the dance studios as striking architectural elements that engage the surrounding community. The beautifully atmospheric graphics effectively communicate the project鈥檚 structural ambition and present a design that feels both complete and highly buildable.
Project Description
BALANCING ACT celebrates dance, performance and the Arts by lifting the main dance studios dramatically in the air presenting them as jewels and exquisite curiosities, to the surrounding community. The public is invited, almost tempted, to participate and explore, a series of stairwells and terraces connecting the highest levels of the studios and museum to the river bank below. The public path through the center winds past the dance studio and culminates in a dramatic cantilevered viewing platform offering spectacular views of the river and surrounding community.
The dramatic expression of steel in the Dance Center enters into a dialogue with the existing Railroad Trestle, a primary point of access to the center, and both draws inspiration from and reinterprets the steel conventions of the existing Trestle. A new series of viewing decks are inserted into the site looking toward the existing bridge, inviting visitors to explore while offering the bridge itself as an object of value and beauty. The existing Trestle itself offers stunning views of the dance center.
The railroad museum introduces a dynamic vertical component to the popular Cardinal Greenway which cuts through the site, weaving public and private together and encouraging interaction with the dance studios. It houses the rich history of railroads and trains in Muncie while framing views of one of the historic Trestles, bringing the existing Trestle into the museum and displaying its longevity.
Category I: Community Dance Center
Students: Bruno Yeh & Gareth Pang
Faculty Sponsor: Ryan Doyle
Institution: Syracuse University
Juror Comments: The Dance is recognized for the methodically developed design, demonstrating careful consideration of structure, sustainability, materiality, and building performance. The expressive steel system, featuring an extended fly-tower and spanning trusses, establishes a strong architectural framework that supports both the spatial experience and the project鈥檚 narrative of revealing the performance process. The clear sectional studies and detailed axonometric drawings effectively communicate the design’s technical execution.
Project Description
When does the performance begin and who gets to be involved? The Dance stems from the idea that everyone is a participant in a performance; from staff to students and visitors. The moment users step onto the site, their bodies join a waltz of mechanisms, light, and production as they move through the building.
The project challenges hierarchies found in performance centers between the main stage and its supporting program. Rather than suppressing these essential facilities and the communities that bring shows to life, the structure itself begins to reveal them while also improving the quality of space within, maintaining privacy and providing comfort to the people working there.
The structural system is catalyzed by the stage. The 40鈥 fly-tower of the main theater is extended throughout the building to function as a large shear wall, bracing a series of four double-height trusses which float above the ground floor. This maximizes open interior space while minimizing the building footprint. Underneath, an undulating landscape provides exploration and engagement before, during, and after performances no matter the season or weather.
The thesis of revealing is enhanced sectionally through the implementation of four distinct light-wells which puncture the slab to let in a range of diffused light. As visitors peer into various spaces, they gain additional views into adjacent rooms above and below, creating a narrative of production leading up to the show experience. Users move through the building鈥檚 structure, initiating a dance of shadows that trickles down to illuminate spaces with animated light.
The structure is streamlined to be achievable using local recycled steel. The entirety of the building鈥檚 primary steel structure can be constructed using an equivalent block of the Syracuse I-81 Viaduct, transforming a historically divisive element of the city into a new local hub of connection and gathering.
Category I: Community Dance Center
Student: Roberto Valenzuela
Faculty Sponsor: Mark Owen
Institution: Woodbury University
Juror Comments: Interchange presents a compelling and cohesive design that thoughtfully reinterprets the Los Angeles River corridor as a place of movement, connection, and community. Strong graphic representation, particularly the sectional perspective. The integration of structure and architectural elements creates a dynamic framework that supports the concept of circulation and exchange.
Project Description
INTERCHANGE
CHOREOGRAPHED INFRASTRUCTURE
Treating the freeway as a design reinterpretation of circulation, distribution, and movement, one that already choreographs bodies, speed, and structure. The forms emerge from this logic: elongated, stretched, and layered geometries that reflect the directional flows of traffic and steel infrastructure spanning the site. Steel becomes a language of extension, tension, and connection, echoing how bridges take shape over time.
INTERCHANGE does not attempt to enclose or fully define space. Instead, it embraces openness, porosity, and the overlap of sound and program. Walls are minimized or removed where possible to allow for visual and physical continuity, reinforcing the idea that movement and exchange are the primary program. Dance reflects聽 this fluid, open, and constantly shifting environment.
What results is a community space that transforms movement into encounter. Reinterpreting the freeway not as a divider but as a point of connection, INTERCHANGE creates a porous framework for dancing, running, biking, gathering, performing, and spontaneous occupation.
Category I: Community Dance Center
Students: Benjamin Levin-Lozovatsky, Sean Christenson & George Kantsler
Faculty Sponsor: Yao Lu
Institution: Thomas Jefferson University
Juror Comments: Negotiating Space has a thoughtful response to the site, using the interplay of landscape, structure, and circulation to create a strong connection to the urban environment. The concept of dance as an architectural framework is clearly articulated, with a convincing structural steel analysis that reinforces the overall design intent.
Project Description
Our building sits in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, between a dense urban environment and a natural landscape. This condition gave us the opportunity to connect both. By reacting to contextual axes and sitting in conversation with the existing buildings, our architecture brings the users into an expanded spatial path focused on an overlooked part of the site. In order to achieve this, our building sits below and above the ground plane, negotiating space in its surroundings.
With two very di铿erent site conditions and two contrasting programs driving the function, our concept arises out of the illusions of dance. The beauty of dance arises from the motion of the individual connecting with their partner and working together. The gestural play of motion, tension and release, in this project is possible with the careful and beautiful play of steel and its boundaries to structure.
Our architecture is conceived as a slit in the ground plane rising up to reveal the structure below. The building鈥檚 functions are split, with the study and practice of dance occurring in the tree canopy, and the performance and community spaces anchored below. The functions interact in the structural arm, which maintains transparency through the park, connecting users to the site. Passage over and under the building reinforces use of the site and the structural illusions.
Category I: Community Dance Center
Student: Matthew Vallejo
Faculty Sponsor: Eric Giragosian
Institution: Woodbury University
Juror Comments: Prism Dance Lab is a transformative and engaging architectural vision of a multicultural dance center. The conceptual framework is thoughtfully developed, demonstrating a strong sense of clarity carried consistently throughout the design and dance program. The structure is a dynamic civic destination that celebrates movement, culture, and the California coastline.
Project Description
Prism Dance Lab is a multicultural movement center designed as a Civic Viewfinder on the California coast. Utilizing a distorted crystalline cube geometry, the building frames the intersection of local culture and the ocean horizon. At its core is a Hyper-Adaptable theater that mechanically reconfigures to host diverse global dance traditions. Surrounding this programmatic heart, a continuous semi-public promenade weaves upward, slowing down urban energy and transforming a meditative coastal climb into a live Public Performance. Inside, the Lab replaces rigid, traditional theater constraints with a vast, Adaptable Seating Layout. This specialized sanctuary grants equal architectural dignity to everything from intense percussive footwork to fluid modern choreography, serving as an experimental laboratory for the world鈥檚 shared movement.
Urban velocity gives way to coastal deceleration. The Prism Dance Lab acts as a structural viewfinder, catching the site鈥檚 energy like a camera lens. Mirroring dance where fluid motion is suddenly frozen; the distorted crystalline cube geometry captures these transitions permanently in time. As the built form encounters the coastal atmosphere, it creates a tactile rhythm between architectural space and human movement.
The perforated steel mesh works as a high-performance barrier that reflects solar heat to take the strain off the HVAC system. The holes allow the beach breeze to naturally ventilate and cool the building, while the sun passing through the panel projects the movement of people inside as shifting silhouettes and shadows. This atmospheric interaction continuously shifts throughout the day, establishing a dynamic environmental dialogue between interior circulation and exterior climate conditions.
The steel mesh transforms the sun鈥檚 glare into a play of shifting silhouettes and rhythmic shadows. By projecting the movement of people through the weave, the screen turns the building鈥檚 functional circulation into a live, architectural choreography of dance. In doing so, everyday human motion is elevated into a public visual event.
The approach to the Prism Dance Lab is a study in shifting tempos, where the high-velocity compression of the urban drive dilates upon arrival at the Playa Del Rey to reveal the “ticks”鈥攖he granular, frame-by-frame movement of bodies through space. Every step mirrors a dancer navigating a complex choreography, where the momentum of arrival finally settles, translating urban energy into a deliberate, captured moment of performance. This transition offers visitors an immersive spatial arrival that recalibrates their physical cadence.
This spatial timeline maps the elasticity of time, moving from dense, blurred high-velocity movement on the left to a decelerated, “ghosted” progression that freezes into a single choreographic anchor. Through this spatial narrative, the architecture anchors both community engagement and physical expression into a unified tectonic experience.
To bridge community and movement, the design brings people and dance together to show the tectonics of steel in its most honest form. Exposed structural joints, load-bearing steel members, and expressive framing remain visible and unadorned, establishing an authentic physical armature that connects the energy of the public with the kinetic art of dance.
Pasquale De Paola
Louisiana Tech University
Alloy Kemp
Thornton Tomasetti
Anthony N. Monica
Belmont University
Category II:
This category offered architecture students the opportunity to select a site and building program using steel as the primary material. This competition category permits any building type other than a Community Dance Center.
Category II: Open
Student: Danny Escandon
Faculty Sponsors: Miguel Guitart & Jin Young Song
Institution: University at Buffalo
Juror Comments: The Spine is a highly focused and mature architectural response to the complex realities of immigrant housing and overcrowding. The nimble use of steel creates a sense of lightness and clarity, while the restrained material palette allows the architecture to feel compelling. The overall design offers a meaningful approach to creating greater dignity and privacy within the existing neighborhood.
Project Description
This project begins with a real residential block in Queens and uses it as a testing ground for a condition that often remains hidden inside immigrant housing: severe overcrowding. Rather than approaching overcrowding as a statistic or as an isolated problem within individual apartments, the project translates multiple stories of domestic pressure into a block-scale architectural proposal. These stories reveal sleeping in hallways, bedrooms shared beyond capacity, kitchens used at unusual hours, bathroom queues, storage overflow, loss of privacy, and the disappearance of family rituals.
The project asks how architecture can provide relief and dignity. In response, it shifts attention to the rear of the block: garages, service lanes, and leftover yards that already form a hidden infrastructure behind the houses. This space becomes the site for a new collective framework.
The proposal argues that overcrowding cannot be solved only through private units or isolated accessory dwellings. When many households experience similar pressures, the response must move beyond the scale of the house and toward the scale of the block. A steel frame, modular rooms, elevated bridges, and shared domestic spaces create a new layer of support for households already living under pressure.
The design proposes a model of architectural relief rooted in dignity and adaptability. It does not imagine a new neighborhood replacing the old one. Instead, it makes visible the lives already present in Queens and asks how the existing block can become a shared structure of support. The project does not claim to solve the housing crisis, but it argues that architecture can create meaningful relief: a door that can be closed, a table that can gather, a place to rest, and room for everyday life to unfold with greater privacy, control, and dignity. Not only occupancy but belonging. Not only shelter, but dignity. Not only survival, but everyday joy.
Category II: Open
Students: Aleksandre Kokochashvili & Ashton Schlotterbeck
Faculty Sponsors: Pasquale De Paola & Kevin Singh
Institution: Louisiana Tech University
Juror Comments: Glacial Reach is an exuberant architectural response to the mystery and remoteness of the Arctic landscape. The steel tower and cantilevered spine create a dynamic architectural framework. The carefully resolved anchor plate details demonstrate a strong level of attention to the steel construction and its connections.
Project Description
The Greenland Shark has lived in waters around Greenland for over five hundred years. We have only photographed it within the last 30 years and captured data from them in the last 10. Between those two timelines lies the premise of this project. Architecture as a structure for confronting what remains unknown.
On the eastern coast of Greenland, this marine research center investigates the existence of the Greenland Shark. Rather treating the Arctic as a distant landscape, Glacial Reach embeds itself into the edge, positioning research, habitation, and observation on the threshold between land, sea, and ice.
Organized into three forms. A vertical steel tower, anchoring the structure to the rocky land beneath the ice and acting as both circulation core and visual marker across the open water. The spine, a cantilevered gallery and port extend out over the fjord without touching the water below, minimizing disruption to marine life and their environment; while the rear is reserved for research and living. The side, a circulatory zone where multiple levels of catwalks are used for visual surveillance. Finally Beneath it, a descending steel and concrete leg penetrates into the arctic water to support the steel structure.
Glacial Reach draws from the biology of the Greenland Shark. The shark possesses a soft cartilage around strong bones. As does the structure of the building. An externalized skeleton of steel and glass lifts off a central spine. Frosted glass and weathering steel also reference the fractured geometry of glacial icy landscape. Allowing the building to alternate its opacity and illumination as light conditions change.
Rather than proposing architecture as an object placed into a familiar environment, this project admits that the Arctic remains largely unknown, and that design can serve as the infrastructure through which new forms of ecological discoveries can be found.
Category II: Open
Student: Gabriel Barton
Faculty Sponsor: Se Won Roy Kim
Institution: Ball State University
Juror Comments: Reclaimed presents a powerful adaptive reuse strategy that reimagines an existing Detroit structure through the use of eye-catching steel insertions. The prominent use of a steel cantilever creates an eye-catching architectural expression with a strong urban presence. The drawings clearly communicate the design intent and reinforce the overall visual impact.
Project Description
Since 2013, the city of Detroit has demolished more than 27,000 homes. Across the United States, building demolition generates nearly 600 million tons of waste each year, most of which is sent to landfills. This practice not only degrades the environment but also represents a significant loss of valuable material resources. [RECLAIMED] addresses this issue through two complementary strategies: the adaptive reuse of an existing structure (the ruins of Fisher Body Plant 21) and the creation of a building material reclamation center. Leveraging the same rail lines and highways that once supported Detroit鈥檚 industrial economy, the project transforms construction waste into refined, reusable building products. Materials are redistributed for use in new construction or showcased within on-site gallery spaces, positioning the building as both an active processing facility and a public interface. In doing so, the project establishes a circular material economy while serving as a community anchor and an active critique of American mass consumerism, supporting Detroit鈥檚 ongoing evolution beyond its industrial past.
Category II: Open
Students: Samantha Hess & Avril Chen
Faculty Sponsor: Kevin Erickson
Institution: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Juror Comments: Rot To Root offers a fascinating approach to adaptive reuse that gives new purpose to a post-industrial waterfront site. The use of reclaimed on-site steel for the raised observation path creates a simple and expressive structural system. The post-and-beam structure provides a clear and effective approach to creating a meaningful public experience.
Project Description
Rot to Root transforms a post-industrial 5-acre pier in Manhattan into a public plant sanctuary, consisting of native marshland plants growing in the rotting piles. Embracing decay as part of the site’s beauty, the plants accelerate the pier’s natural deterioration while a structurally independent, raised observation path, built entirely from reclaimed on-site steel, allows visitors to explore with minimal environmental impact. As an extension to the end of the Highline, Rot to Root encourages tourists and locals alike to experience the native ecology of the Hudson River and access the waterfront.
Category II: Open
Students: Edwin Sun, Jingsong Zhou, Dylan Martos, Tiana Nicole Mangrobang & Jayden Uowolo
Faculty Sponsor: Clark Llewellyn
Institution: University of Hawai驶i at M膩noa
Juror Comments: Hillside is an ambitious project that reimagines energy infrastructure as a civic and ecological destination. The expressive use of steel creates a strong architectural framework for the large-scale building. The design offers a convincing exploration of how infrastructure can serve as both a functional system and a public landscape.
Project Description
The Hillside reimagines industrial infrastructure as a living framework for future energy, intelligence, and ecological growth in Hawai驶i. Rather than treating a power plant as a hidden utility, the building proposes a new relationship between structure, landscape, technology, and everyday life. It explores how architecture can become an active system that produces energy, supports environmental recovery, and allows human living to exist alongside infrastructure rather than apart from it.
The building responds to Hawai驶i鈥檚 conditions of import dependency, land scarcity, waste production, and climate vulnerability. Through this lens, the power plant becomes more than a machine for generating electricity. It becomes civic and ecological infrastructure that reflects how Hawai驶i might move toward greater self-reliance. The sloped steel landform merges building and ground, allowing the structure to operate as both terrain and framework. This creates a place where movement, gathering, recreation, and landscape are integrated into the daily experience of infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence strengthens this vision by positioning the project as a potential center for future technological development in Hawai驶i. As AI continues to demand large amounts of energy, the project asks how energy infrastructure and intelligence infrastructure could evolve together. Instead of relying on outside systems for both power and technological advancement, Hawai驶i could develop local infrastructure that supports data, research, environmental monitoring, and energy optimization within one architectural framework.
Ultimately, The Flower Plant proposes a future where industrial architecture is no longer separate from public life, landscape, or intelligence. It becomes a regenerative platform that connects energy production with ecological stewardship, technological growth, and human occupation, offering Hawai驶i a model for infrastructure that is adaptive, visible, and rooted in everyday life.
Category II: Open
Students: Zachary Wood, Garrett Clifton & Connor Fonseca
Faculty Sponsor: Pasquale De Paola & Kevin Singh
Institution: Louisiana Tech University
Juror Comments: Port D.R.E.D.G.E. demonstrates a unique response to the changing conditions of the Gulf Coast with an innovative use of steel. The simplicity of the steel tower and bridge creates a clear architectural language that feels both elegant and purposeful. The extended steel cantilever highlights how the structure can transform a bridge-like system into a plausible building at the water鈥檚 edge.
Project Description
The Louisiana Coast is losing over 16 square miles of land annually to erosion and subsidence, this devastation extends across the Gulf, with Texas, Mississippi, and Florida collectively losing hundreds of acres of shoreline each year to the same relentless forces of erosion. These losses threaten both human communities and fragile ecosystems along the Gulf Coast. Current restoration methods are limited in scale and cannot keep up with the rate of land loss. This gap between environmental decay and mechanical response creates a compounding crisis, one that demands a departure from traditional, isolated engineering in favor of a more fluid, integrated approach to coastal survival.
We are proposing, PORT D.R.E.D.G.E., a system that facilitates a restoration cycle: extracting sediment, refining it to remove debris, and strategically redeploying it to stabilize vulnerable coastlines. It positions architecture as a tool of resilience, demonstrating that restoring the coastline can be both a practical and educational endeavor, where human presence, infrastructure, and ecosystem recovery operate as one. This operation integrates real-time environmental monitoring with active land-building, allowing for a continuous feedback loop. By housing both industrial processing and public observation within a single operation, the system transforms coastal restoration into a transparent, adaptive, and ecological service.
Juney Lee
Carnegie Mellon University
Leandro Piazzi
Virginia Tech
Mohamed Sharif
University of California, Los Angeles
The competition had over 1,300 participants from the following schools:
Ball State University, Boston Architectural College, California Polytechnic State University, California State University, Sacramento, Carnegie Mellon University, Clemson University, Cornell University, Drexel University, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Florida Atlantic University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Glendale Community College, Indiana University, Keene State College, Kennesaw State University, Lawrence Technological University, Louisiana State University, Louisiana Tech University, Madison College, Marywood University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Miami Dade College, Miami University, Mississippi State University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, New York Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Oklahoma State University, Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, Prairie View A&M University, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, Savannah College of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M University, Thomas Jefferson University, Toronto Metropolitan University, University at Buffalo, University of Calgary, University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Houston, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Kansas, University of Louisiana – Lafayette, University of Memphis, University of Missouri – Columbia, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University of Oklahoma, University of Oregon, University of Texas at San Antonio, University of the District of Columbia, University of Virginia, University of Waterloo, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Virginia Tech, Woodbury University
Edwin Hern谩ndez-Ventura
Awards and Competitions Manager
ehernandez@acsa-arch.org
202.785.2324
Eric Wayne Ellis
Senior Director of Operations and Programs
eellis@acsa-arch.org
202.785.2324
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