The Architectural League Prize 2015
Thom Moran
For more on Thom Moran and the other 2015 League Prize winners, visit archleague.org/LP15
Ann Arbor, MI-based designer Thom Moran imbues architecture with humor as a means to provoke a “momentary stopping and reconsidering of the world” and to “root out rigidity of thinking.” He uses the uncanny or weird to offer a critique of practice as well as investigate underexplored ideas in the discipline.
His Authenticity installation is a series of updated caryatids — part column and part human form — that draw from their history as a warning to one’s enemies through figures representing enslaved women. Modeled from 3D body scans of Moran and his associates and built of heavy-gauge aluminum foil and insulation foam, the forms’ incongruity finds humor in their strangeness. And a bonus for literary buffs: Moran also details why satirical author George Saunders is his current “favorite person in the world.”
