North Carolina Modernist Houses (NCMH) is pleased to announce that Ian Price of McMichael High School in Mayodan, Lacy Turner of Washington High School in Washington, and Wesley Pritzlaff of Rolesville High in Rolesville are the winners in the inaugural student category of the 2014 George Matsumoto Prize for Modern Residential Design across North Carolina.

The students’ submissions to the Matsumoto Prize was the result of their schools' drafting classes participation in Project Bauhow, an educational initiative sponsored by NCMH with support from the Kramden Institute.

Project Bauhow (Bauhaus + Know-How) provides free desktop computers that support CAD (computer aided design) software to ninth and tenth grade students in carefully selected drafting classes statewide. The students who receive the computers do not have access to computers at home that can support the CAD software.

In exchange for the computers, the teachers agreed to have all of their students design a single-family Modernist house that could be submitted to the Matsumoto Prize’s student category.

The assignment came with imaginary details about the size of the house, the number of people in the family, each individual’s special needs and/or interests, and other information an architect would need to design a home specific to the site and the client. In this imaginary family, two sisters are moving in together with their children, one of whom is confined to a wheel chair so accessibility was an issue. (To read more about the students’ assignment, go to http://www.ncmodernist.org/bauhow.htm.)

Members of the Triangle Area Design Society -- architects Frank Harmon, Dennis Stallings, Phil Szostak, David Hill, and Jeffrey Lee -- juried this year’s competition and determined that Ian’s, Lacy’s, and Wesley’s designs were the best from their respective schools.

As a result, NCMH is giving these three students scholarships to attend North Carolina State University’s well-known Design Day Camp from July 14-18, 2014.

“Through the establishment of Project Bauhow, North Carolina Modernist Houses is to be commended for its efforts to give high school students access to computers and technology that might otherwise be unavailable to them,” said Dennis Stallings, FAIA, who is also a professor at NCSU’s College of Design. “Giving these students the ability to experience a real design problem and execute it opens the door for many of them to potentially pursue a career in design. The students should be commended for taking on this design challenge and learning the software that allowed them to execute it.”

North Carolina Modernist Houses is an award-winning non-profit organization dedicated to archiving, preserving, and promoting Modernist residential design statewide. For more information visit www.ncmodernistorg.

For more information on Project Bauhow, click here. To see a WNCT TV segment on one of the winners, click here.

For more information on the 2014 George Matsumoto Prize for architects and designers who have built single-family houses anywhere in North Carolina, visit http://www.ncmodernist.org/prize2014.