2026 Competition
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks
Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Critical intervention into the urban field requires first recognizing the contested spatial and institutional power dynamics that drive today's urban and bio-regional crises. The 2026 Lyceum Fellowship competition asks participants to first expose and visualize a particular conflict—reflecting on the requisite political, economic, social, and spatial processes—then design the conditions to tackle this conflict.
2026 Competition Overview
Design competitions often deliver a brief to participating students, describing a problem, a site and a program, then students follow these parameters and present an architectural design proposal. Nothing wrong with this norm! That is what we do as designers. But our call for the 2026 Lyceum competition presents a different challenge: We are asking participants to design the brief, the site(s) and the program(s), themselves, based on a particular conflict of their choice, taking a ‘position’ in the context of today’s unprecedented crises.
The competition requirements are divided into two steps:
- STEP 1: Naming and visualizing a particular conflict
- STEP 2: Designing a brief around this conflict and a set of strategies to tackle it
This means we are asking participants to ‘name’ and visualize a particular problematic, and then designing the conditions, the field of operations required to tackle this problematic, including strategies about the requisite political, economic, social and spatial processes that are necessary to confront the selected conflict.
Jury
Teddy Cruz
Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Director of Urban Research, Center on Global Justice
Professor of Public Culture and Spatial Practice, Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego
Fonna Forman
Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman
Professor of Political Theory, University of California, San Diego
Founding Director, UCSD Center on Global Justice
William R. Morrish
Professor Emeritus, Urban Ecologies, New School, New York
Architect and Activist Urban Scholar
Co-Founder Invested Public Network LLC
Dr. Dana Cuff
Director cityLAB-UCLA
Distinguished Professor, Architecture and Urban Design
Molly Moore
Director of Marketing, Gensler Boston
2026 Winners
1st Prize
Nicky Rhodes
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Jonathan Grinham
Faculty Advisor
2nd Prize
Rikki Cai
Toronto Metropolitan University
Dustin Valen
Faculty Advisor
3rd Prize
Merv Benjamin
Boston Architectural College
Shaun Lynch
Faculty Advisor
Merit
Omar Leon
Cornell University
Catherine Chen
Faculty Advisor