The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards recently honored Oklahoma State University as the grand prize winner in the 2004 NCARB Prize Competition. Oklahoma State, along with five other architecture programs, was recognized during the NCARB Annual Meeting in Portland, Ore., this summer. Now in its third year, the NCARB Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy draws submissions from dozens of National Architectural Accrediting Board-accredited schools of architecture.

Oklahoma State’s 2004 NCARB Prize-winning entry, “Integrated/Interactive/ Innovative: The Comprehensive Semester,” showcases a long-term effort to unite the design studio with issues of structural design, environmental performance and controls, and project management. Oklahoma State representatives Suzanne Bilbeisi, associate professor and program coordinator for OSU’s Comprehensive Semester, and Randy Seitsinger, AIA, head of the School of Architecture, accepted the $25,000 prize.

OSU representatives receive the $25,000 grand prize check at the NCARB Annual Meeting in Portland, Ore., (left to right): OSU Professor Emeritus John Bennett, FAIA; former OSU students and Comprehensive Semester participants Lauren McQuillen and Kyle Zerbey; Studio Coordinator and OSU Associate Professor Suzanne Bilbeisi; Peter Steffian, FAIA, 2001 NCARB president and NCARB Prize juror; Janet White, AIA, NCARB Prize jury chair; and Michiel M. Bourdrez, AIA, NCARB staff liaison.

Five additional programs were honored as 2004 NCARB Prize winners, with each receiving $7,500.

• California College of the Arts Department of Architecture’s “Collaborative Teaching with Professional Mentorship” is a required course on integrated building systems for second-year architecture and interior-design students. The course is built around a collaborative teaching partnership with a consulting engineering firm and professional mentors.
• Rice University School of Architecture’s “BW + RH (Rice Building Workshop + Project Row Houses)” involves students taking part in the Rice Building Workshop, an elective course. Over the past eight years, students have contributed to local revitalization projects in partnership with a local nonprofit, Project Row Houses.
• University of Kentucky School of Architecture’s “The Comprehensive Project: A Practice Based Studio” is a capstone course first organized in 1999 that reconfigures the traditional studio model to create an accelerated learning environment for students who are engaged in community-based projects.
• University of Miami School of Architecture’s “Interdisciplinary Community Building: Strengthening a Neighborhood” is a five-year-old community outreach program that brings aid to a distressed neighborhood from the university’s schools of architecture, law, and medicine and departments of history, communications, and art and art history.
• University of Washington Department of Architecture’s “Urban Acupuncture” is a neighborhood design/build studio taught for the past 16 years by Steve Badanes, architecture professor and the HSW Endowed Chair, with fellow faculty member Damon Smith in coordination with the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods.

The jury also awarded honorable mentions to:

• Clemson Architecture Center, for “The Borough Project”
• University of Kentucky, for “Breaking Ground: Partnership & Process as Design Strategy.”

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