2018 Best of Design Awards winner for Student Work: mise-en-sand

Designer: Jonah Merris, University of California, Berkeley

Nature is artificial, and occasionally, it is artifice. So how can architecture act as a register of constructed ground in the era of the human geomorphic agent? Jonah Merris designed mise-en-sand, a proposal for a 21st-century exposition that addresses the extraction and exploitation of sand, as a series of six composed set designs that would allow visitors to consider the high volume–low value-paradox of sand as a global commodity. The sites and processes depicted in these vignettes showcase the breadth of scales and geographies across which the construction and deconstruction of ground occurs. Within mise-en-sand, architecture becomes a performance wherein objects are staged and meaning implied—a sandbox where observers can reconsider naturalism as it applies to something as ubiquitous as sand.

Honorable Mentions

Project name: Cloud Fabuland
Designer: Eleonora Orlandi, SCI-Arc

Project name: Real Fake
Designer: James Skarzenski, University of California, Berkeley