Faculty named winner of the 2025 Architectural League Prize

May 6, 2025

By Isabel Berman

Juan Medina, Professor of Practice in Architecture at Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment, recently had his work recognized internationally. His firm salazarsequeromedina, has been named to the newest cohort of winners in the biennial Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. Medina's firm is led by Pablo Sequero, faculty at Syracuse Unviersity, and Laura Salazar, who is faculty at Pratt Institute.

The Architectural League Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in North America for emerging architects and designers, celebrating innovative work that challenges conventions and engages critically with contemporary practice. Organized by The Architectural League of New York, the 2025 Prize invites designers within ten years of graduation to respond to the theme “Plot”—a prompt that explores architecture’s intrinsic connection to narrative, whether through site, process, drawing, or story. This year’s theme encourages entrants to uncover the twists, schemes, and circumstances that shape their work and to reflect on the narrative threads—both planned and unexpected—that guide their design trajectories. The competition emphasizes conceptual rigor, originality, and the ability to articulate a distinctive architectural voice. Winning entries will be featured in a public exhibition and lecture series, contributing to an ongoing dialogue about how architecture reveals, reframes, and rewrites the stories of our built environment.

The firm’s work stood out for its ability to translate narrative themes into built form, embodying the spirit of this year’s Prize theme, “Plot,” through projects that are as story-driven as they are socially grounded. Founded in 2020, their practice operates at the intersection of community engagement, environmental sensitivity, and experimental design, often constructing “open-ended structures” using repurposed materials. Their projects—ranging from Sobremesas, a modular dining installation for the 13th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in Lima, to The Outdoor Room, a pavilion for the 2023 Seoul Biennale—reflect a commitment to both local storytelling and global dialogue. In alignment with this year’s Prize theme, salazarsequeromedina’s work reveals how architecture unfolds across physical, cultural, and narrative terrains, embracing unexpected twists while rooting design in place, process, and people.