Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism
2011 update
After five years of recognizing the best in design writing and
criticism by authors under 40 in the United States, AIGA and
Winterhouse Institute have discontinued the competition portion of
this program. Since 2006 the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing
and Criticism have sought to increase the understanding and
appreciation of design, both within the profession and throughout
American life. A program of AIGA, the awards were founded by
Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse
Institute to recognize excellence in writing about design, and
to encourage the development of young voices in design writing,
commentary and criticism. This program is part of a larger AIGA
initiative to stimulate new levels of design awareness and critical
thinking about design.
AIGA and Winterhouse will continue to support writing as a means of promoting awareness of design and its practitioners. We will announce new plans here in May. If you’d like to be notified when information is available, please contact us to request an update.
2010
The Writing Award—open to writers, critics, scholars, historians,
journalists and designers, in the amount of $10,000—is awarded to Daniel Brook. Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner Take All America (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2007) and has written about architecture for Harper’s, Slate.com and Metropolis,
among other publications. He was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long
Island, and educated at Yale. He is currently a writer-in-residence at
the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where he is at work on a
book on the architecture of Westernization, to be published by W. W.
Norton in 2012.
Read Daniel Brook’s three submissions:
The Education Award—open to undergraduate or graduate students whose
use of writing, in the interest of making visual work or scholarship or
cultural observation, demonstrates extraordinary originality and
promise, in the amount of $1,000—is awarded to Aileen Kwun.
Kwun earned her BA in English at the University of California,
Berkeley, where her study of literature instilled a love of language and
a drive to unearth the subtext of our constructed surroundings.
Following her relocation to New York, she earned a Certificate in
Publishing from Columbia University’s School of Journalism and worked
for two years as a publicist for Princeton Architectural Press. She is
currently an MFA candidate in Design Criticism at the School of Visual
Arts, and is quick to point out that she is actually not a fan of Lady
Gaga’s music.
Read Aileen Kwun’s submission: