Nancy Hou of AAS and BFA ID and Joshua de Sousa whom teaches in AAS ID recently received much praise on their entry for The National Museum of World Writing. The duo was awarded Second Prize. The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism held a blind international competition for a 230,000 sq ft, $49 million museum/community center in Songdo (a massive, newly constructed “smart city” neighboring Seoul). To read more, click HERE!

hou de sousa’s proposal for the museum addresses these opposites, creating a container for the study and exposition of writing as an ancient manifestation of culture, in a city whose culture is so new as to be undefined. in the process, the designers are writing this new city’s culture through architecture. their strategy addresses these conditions by proposing a form evocative of the very thing songdo lacks… a history. rather than employing stereotypical historic architectural forms, the designers look for places where the fundamentals of writing and architecture overlap – solid to void relationships, the trace of gesture on surface, the meaning in the depth of a mark, penetration, or extrusion. To read more, click HERE!