IIT Architecture students Jong Nyoung Park and Jordan Widjaja, (BArch '18) have been named the recipients of the 2018 Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Architecture, granted and administered by the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Now in its thirtieth year, the Schiff Fellowship is given annually to students from either the University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Institute of Technology, or The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The winning student portfolio becomes part of the permanent collection of architectural drawings housed within the Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings.
The recognized project, "Arena of Ludic Protocols" was selected by a jury consisting of Cristóbal Amunátegui (Amunátegui Valdés Architects, Los Angeles), Pam Daniels (Assistant Professor, Segal Design Institute, Northwestern University), Todd Palmer (Executive Director, Chicago Architecture Biennial), and Casey Renner (Vice President, HOK, Chicago).
The project consists of a gymnasium and student housing, and is a contribution to larger research on campus housing addressed in the IIT Architecture Cloud Studio led by Inaugural MCHAP.emerge winners Pezo von Ellrichshausen.
In a statement issued by the studio, Arena of Ludic Protocols is described as being situated at the edge between a stadium, a theater, a circus and a spa. A contemporary gymnasium that keeps a hedonistic memory incarnated in its obsessively sanitized floors, in the idealized image of the perfected body, the ambition of a beautiful and healthy body, the one built over tedious workout and hidden pharmaceutical support, is where the sensual nakedness of the original Greek palestra lies (of course, currently deprived from its philosophical extent). Despite the uncanny metaphor, and maybe closer to the eroded condition of a ruin, a fitness hall can still be understood as a naked architecture for almost naked people enjoying or suffering their own bodies; as a voluntary seclusion into the rules of their games.In those terms, both free time (pure leisure) or normalized time (institutionalized sport) are more or less regulated courts contained within the pervasive typology of an open plan, where architecture is reduced to its bones. Yet, the very informality of the game, amusement and delight, allows for a more theatrical setting or even a permissive free form. Perhaps as the natural consequence of the metabolist creed, in its high-tech eclectic “symbiosis”, the explicitly “weak” nudity of Kurokawa’s fitness Center in Chicago could be reinvented."