Announcing the Recipients of the Spring 2026 Architecture Awards
Models of "Oakland Firehouse 14," Sydney Mansavage and collaborator, Fall 2025.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture is proud to announce the student recipients of our Spring 2026 Architecture Awards.
This spring's awards provide $30,000 of funding to support our undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. students. Awards recognize professional promise, public interest design and sustainable design. We extend our thanks to the juries and staff for supporting the awards program.
Please join us in congratulating the recipients on their tremendous accomplishments, and thanks to all of those who applied. We appreciate the generous support of our donors for making these awards available to our students.
Professional Promise Award
Stewart L. Brown Memorial Scholarship | Fourth-Year B.Arch Student Award
This scholarship recognizes professional promise in terms of attitudes and scholastic achievement. A jury convened by the Pittsburgh AIA evaluates the applications and selects the recipients.
Spring 2026 Jury: Pittsburgh AIA Chapter leadership: Rebecca Schwartz (President), Bob Shelton (Immediate Past President), Brenna Martin-Schaffer (First Vice President)
First Place: Sydney Mansavage, B.Arch '27
Award: $4,000
Jury Comment: The jury was incredibly impressed with Sydney's work, particularly on the build of the Spring Carnival pavilion. The project thinks about circularity every single step of the way, and tackles collaboration in different forms: with the university at large, with other students, and with different types of practitioners. The project also takes deconstruction into consideration and thinks about how the components can be repurposed into another life in Millvale. We thought that this project showed a broad, holistic and deep understanding of every single step of the design process and real innovative thinking about how each of those pieces of the process could be spun up into something bigger and more impactful.
Runner-Up: Ashley Jauregui, B.Arch '27
Award: $3,000
Jury Comment: Ashley showed a lovely commitment to her community that was demonstrated at all phases of the work. We're excited that she'll be moving on to pursue a Master of Urban Design at Carnegie Mellon next year. Many of our strongest practitioners are those who view design problems through multiple lenses, so we think that following the completion of both programs Ashley will be able to marry these two disciplines in an innovative way.
Runner-Up: Kiki Kuang, B.Arch '27
Award: $3,000
Jury Comment: The jury was impressed by how Kiki demonstrated a holistic approach to architecture that explores practice from multiple perspectives. She shows an inspired approach to design to provide safe and supportive environments that profoundly impact people's lives while also making work that is beautiful and relevant.
Public Interest Design Awards
George W. Anderson, Jr. Award | Master's & Ph.D. Student Award
This award recognizes graduate students who demonstrate through their work an exceptional level of attention to detail or dedication to beneficially impacting the community. The eight finalists presented Pecha Kucha presentations of their work in front of a live audience on March 30.
Spring 2026 Jury: Daragh Byrne (Chair), Jared Abraham, Hal Hayes, Maryam Karimi
First Place: Rupal Singh, M.Arch '26, Andrew Long, M.Arch '26 & Joanne Zeng, M.Arch '26
Title: "Indigenuity: Of and for Menominee — Sustainable Development Institute, Wisconsin"
Award: $3,000
Jury Comment: The jury recognizes this project for its strong presentation, deep community engagement, and thoughtful interpretation of cultural traditions, vernacular forms, and material practices. The project stood out for the care with which it connects Indigenous knowledge, craft, and seasonal cycles to a deeply grounded vision for a sustainable design.
Runner-Up: Cyphanah Arshad Khan, MUD '26
Title: "France Colony, Islamabad"
Award: $2,000
Jury Comment: This project was selected for its strong sense of context, its incisive reading of a city shaped by exclusion, and its careful attention to the lived realities of a community rendered invisible by design. The proposal is especially compelling in its reimagining of the wall not simply as a barrier, but as an urban interface of negotiation through which residents might claim recognition and agency.
Runner-Up: Vaibhav Panchal, MAAD '26
Title: "From City to Forest: In the Memory of Billions"
Award: $2,000
Jury Comment: The jury commends this project for its powerful framing of ecological loss and its imaginative exploration of how design might create shared space with other species. Ambitious in scope and thoughtful in its long-term vision, the project offers a compelling meditation on migration, coexistence, and designing for more-than-human futures.
Runner-Up: Ronishka Sabu Nalpathil, PhD-Arch '28
Title: "Come, I'll show you the work my mother taught me: A photovoice project"
Award: $2,000
Jury Comment: This project was chosen for its clarity, compelling sense of purpose, and deeply embedded engagement with practice and people. The project stands out for its intentional use of photovoice to share interpretive power with communities and to offer a rich account of cultural practices and the conditions under which they continue.
David Lewis Community Engagement Design Scholarship | Undergraduate Student Award
This award provides financial support to undergraduate students whose work celebrates David Lewis' legacy by engaging community in the design process. Recipients' work demonstrates a commitment to working within diverse communities through participatory architectural design and displays values of social justice and community service.
Spring 2026 Jury: Francesca Torello, Heather Bizon, Jackie McFarland, An Lewis
First Place: Shahzadi Padda, B.Arch '26
Title: "Homes 4 Homes: Honduras Housing Competition"
Award: $3,000
Jury Comment: Shahzadi's submission presented her work as part of a student team in the "Honduras Housing Competition" promoted by nonprofit Homes 4 Homes. The jury found Shahzadi's application to be aligned with the mission of the award because of the project's attention to community cohesion and empowerment. The simple design of single-family housing was thoughtfully transformed into a modular framework that can be expanded, personalized, and transformed over time. This flexibility reflects local cultural needs by supporting intergenerational living, while shared areas between units create opportunities for collective spaces, encouraging neighborhood cohesion. The jury also appreciated the effort to communicate effectively with the community by providing, as part of the design, an additional construction packet entirely in Spanish and using a diagrammatic visual language that helps communicate across literacy levels. These tools position residents not as recipients of aid, but as active participants in shaping their homes and community.
Runner-Up: Delaney Rice, B.Arch '26
Title: "Queer Joy: Chosen Family and the Spaces We Create"
Award: $500
Jury Comment: The jury found Delaney Rice's thesis-based proposal "Queer Joy: Chosen Family and the Spaces We Create" to exemplify the core values of the award through its commitment to more intentional environments of care: spaces that actively support and celebrate the diverse identities of the LGBTQ+ community. We particularly appreciate Delaney's effort to design a space that embraces the joy of the queer community, where queer individuals and their chosen family can feel comfortable, open and free, and where their joy, love, and existence can be celebrated.
Sustainable Design Award
Ralph H. Burt Jr. and Alva L. Hill Scholarship | Fourth-Year B.Arch & First-Year Master's Student Award
This award provides financial support to students whose work focuses on sustainable environments, performance-based design, and systems integration throughout the design process in alignment with the legacy of the work of Burt Hill.
Spring 2026 Jury: Matthew Huber (Chair), Vicky Achnani, Neal Lucas Hitch, Yiqun Pan
Recipient: Ashley Jauregui, B.Arch '27
Award: $2,500
Recipient: Zara Song, B.Arch '27
Award: $2,500
Recipient: Stuti Garg, MSRSD '27
Award: $2,500