A professor of mine from undergrad at UB, Joyce Hwang, whose firm is called Ants of the Prairie was recently named as one of eight “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York for 2014 (http://archleague.org/2014/02/emerging-voices-2014/).

A huge congratulations to Joyce who is now a part of the long and impressive history of past winners! (http://archleague.org/2000/05/past-emerging-voices/) The list is long, including Steven Holl, Morphosis, Stan Allen, MOS, Jeanne Gang + some current MIT professors: Nader Tehrani, Sheila Kennedy, Mark Goulthorpe, Vincent James and Meejin Yoon.

Joyce will be in NYC to give a lecture on Thursday March 13. That evening’s event will also feature Rael – San Fratello Architects from San Francisco, and will be moderated by Fred Bernstein. See here for more info:http://archleague.org/2014/03/emerging-voices-ants-of-the-prairie-and-rael-san-fratello/. I'm planning on attending and am quite excited!

I worked with Joyce along side a handful of other students on the Bat House (see Projects page http://www.lauraschmitzdesign.com/bat-house2/) which was a fun project to design and build. I presented this project to my aspiring architecture students that I taught at the Boston Architectural College in 2012 and I think it expanded their mind about what kinds of things an architect can design. "A house for bats? Bats? like you mean the ones that fly around?" Yup. Architects can design bat houses! And endless other cool stuff...see Ants of the Prairie: http://www.antsoftheprairie.com/