ISSUE XVI Awarded the Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals

ISSUE XVI – the annual student-produced publication of undergraduate and graduate student work from The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture – has received AIA New York’s Center for Architecture’s 2020 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals. Founded in the late 1980s to encourage student journalism about architecture, planning and related subjects, and to foster regard for intelligent criticism among future professionals, the Douglas Haskell Award supports the ongoing publication of student-edited journals about architectural design, history, and theory.

Each year, the ISSUE editorial team is tasked with capturing the nature of a school year at UTSOA by highlighting a selection of undergraduate and graduate student work completed over the course of the year. This year’s team took it a step further by creating a companion book featuring a collection of student essays that explore this year's theme of "conflict." Typically distibuted in-person at the end of the semester, this year's edition of ISSUE is available to peruse digitally, with the distribution of physical copies to be determined this fall. 

Join us in congratulating the nine student-editors of ISSUE XVI: Ian Amen, Alicia Chen, Camille Vigil, Cole Bennette, Fatima Betts, Heather Corcoran, MaKayla Rutt, Robbie Anderson, and Zeke Jones.

For more information about the Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals, visit the Center for Architecture’s news release. You can also check out the digital edition of ISSUE XVI and the companion book here, and read the ISSUE XVI statement of purpose, as submitted by the editorial team, below. 

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ISSUE, the annual publication of student work at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, is inherently problematic. We are tasked with publishing a single document intended to capture the nature of a year for a school which over eight different disciplines. Unlike publications at other schools, ISSUE is student-run. Each publication is autonomous in itself, since no two books share the same editorial team. This lends ISSUE its experimental nature, but ensues conflict regarding choice of representation.

We, the nine student-editors of ISSUE XVI, set out to exemplify the essence of UTSOA in 2019. Within our team, we represent students of architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture and design, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. The material we curated was sourced through our open calls to students and supplemented by reaching out to faculty across these disciplines, in the hopes that we might achieve a more balanced snapshot of the school. Our subjective lens embraced the questionable nature of an appropriate portrayal, given our perception that a major philosophical and pedagogical shift is occurring in architecture schools – one where the agency of architects to solve large-scale social problems in the modernist dictum is being questioned and reexamined, much as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Not only does conflict relate to the titular word of the publication – ISSUE – we believe it, as a theme, provides avenues by which the multidisciplinary nature of UTSOA can be explored, by presenting various disciplines and approaches in direct dialogue. We hope this book, and its theme, continues the already controversial topic of representation within the School of Architecture, and that this book serves as a forum by which students and faculty can disagree.