The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) Award was instituted in 1985 and is now given annually for outstanding peer-reviewed articles published in the Essay, Design, Narrative, and Image categories during the preceding academic year. Nominations are solicited from the JAE Editorial Board for each year’s awards, for a final decision by the ACSA Board of Directors.

We are thrilled to announce our 2025 Award Winners!

JAE Essay Award 2025: Gabrielle Printz, “Man Made: DuPont and Desert Development in Iran,” in JAE 77.2 Deserts, edited by Ersela Kripa, Francesco Marullo, and Stephen Mueller.

This essay traverses linked scales of development by DuPont, centering on its Iranian joint venture, Polyacryl Iran Corporation. This brief episode of petrochemical development took place where the global supply chain linked oil to polyester, amid the corporate and architectural patronage of the late Pahlavi era, and in the literal ground of the desert outside of Isfahan. Over the course of construction and plant startup (1975–79), DuPont’s synthetics mythology acted on the desert site and local labor, understood to be similarly amenable to transformation. The relatively minor part played by architects Moira Moser (Khalili) and Nader Khalili in this process are also curiously cast in terms of plasticity, something they attributed to the landscape and its capacity for change.

Read this article here.

JAE Narrative Award 2025: Dalal Musaed Alsayer, “Visualizing the Desert: Karl S. Twitchell and the Environmental Imaginaries of the Saudi Arabian Desert, 1936-1948,” in JAE 77.2 Deserts, edited by Ersela Kripa, Francesco Marullo, and Stephen Mueller.

This paper uses three different representations (aerial photograph, map, photograph) to shed light on how environmental imaginaries of the desert systematically created a “wasteland” that enabled an architecture of exploitation and extraction in which the histories, characteristics, and narratives of Saudi Arabia were replaced. Organized in chronological order, the images were produced in connection with US geologist Karl Saben Twitchell’s desire to extract resources from Saudi Arabia through his role as the Saudi King’s confidant and US expert. Here, representation and extraction allowed Twitchell and his company, Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate, to frame the landscape as a “regime of emptiness” that enabled the systematic transformation of the Saudi desert.

Read this article here.

JAE Design Award 2025: Amina Kaskar, “The Indian Delights Cookbook,” in JAE 78.1 Infidelities, edited by Aya Musmar, Nishat Awan & Menna Agha.

Indian Delights, a beloved cookbook for many in South Africa’s Indian and Indian descendant community holds a special sentimental and cultural nostalgia. Not only does the cookbook document Indian culture through food practices; it is simultaneously a valuable model for recalling practices of resistance within the tensions of racial and customary constraint for Indian women in South Africa in the twentieth century. This text uses visual ethnography to speculate on Indian Delights as a “disloyal” or “infidel” treatise for soft spatial practices—one that is shaped by collective, domestic, and joyful forms of space-making that disrupt the conventional making of architectural form.

Read this article here.

View the winners here: https://www.acsa-arch.org/awards-archive/2025-architectural-education-award-winners/#jae

For more on this annual awards program, please visit https://www.acsa-arch.org/awards/jae-article-awards.