The Avery Review Essay Prize 2026
SUBMISSIONS DUE JANUARY 31, 2026
The Avery Review, a journal of critical essays on architecture published by the Office of Publications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, invites submissions for its ninth annual Essay Prize. The call is open to current students (undergraduate and masters) and recent graduates, whether in schools of architecture or elsewhere (eligibility details below). In keeping with the mission of the journal, we hope to receive submissions that use the genres of the review and the critical essay to explore the urgent questions animating the field of architecture. We’re looking for essays that test and expand the author’s own intellectual commitments—theoretical, architectural, and political—through the work of others.
We plan to award one first-place prize ($4,000) and three second-place prizes ($2,000) across the various categories of eligible participants. The winning essays will be published in our June 2026 issue.
We encourage you to (re)visit and (re)read the prize winning essays of years past!
In 2025, Tugra Agrikli contended with the imminent Istanbul earthquake, employing risk as a framework to trace the city’s fractured earth alongside its social, political, temporal, and legal systems; Syeda Khadeeja rejected the notion of neutrality in genocide, reminding us to seize the fragility of the occupiers’ words and worlds in our pursuit of languages of liberation; Jenna Mullender pointed to the conspicuous absence of self-emancipated Black women from the archives of eighteenth-century Jamaica, patching together an alternative record of secret freedoms and spatial resistance; and Allise Matsuno introduced the concept of “architectural aliasing” to unfold an ancestral Japanese home across time and place, text and annotation, personal history and political fact.
In 2024, Yifei Zhang lingered on the liminality present and persistent in the Bibby Stockholm barge—floating and suspended between land and sea, between prison and camp, between confinement and freedom; Shirley Dongwei Chen followed the American dumbwaiter across various sites, unfurling a network of stories entangling the racial, gender, and bureaucratic inequalities that together define the modern US; Ferial Massoud clocked the use of time as an urban tactic wielded by and against colonial forces, turning the dial between French and Algerian tempos; and Sigrid Schmeisser dug up the global consequences of waste management design, and its aftercare, in the Netherlands.
And we invite you to read essays from our 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 Essay Prize winners in issues 31, 39, 46, 52, 57, and 62 which can be found on our Issues page.
Submissions
Submissions for the Avery Review Essay Prize should take the form of critical essays on books, buildings, and other architectural media, broadly defined. We’re delighted to receive work that was developed in the context of classes and seminars as well as independent writing. Our essays are typically 3,000–4,500 words in length and have some object of review at their core. We like stylish, concise, accessible, and earnestly felt writing. Texts should be submitted as double-spaced Word files without images; you may provide six to eight images compiled into a separate PDF (keep attachments to 3mb max please). Submissions should be emailed to editors@averyreview.com.
Eligibility
Current undergraduates, current masters-level students, and recent graduates (graduation date after 12/1/2024) from any undergraduate or master’s program at any university are eligible. Please include your student status and graduation date (actual or anticipated) in your submission email. We encourage submissions from any field of study that takes architecture as a subject.
If you will be a student in the 2025–2026 academic year, please be aware that in accordance with university and federal policy, prizes and awards are taxable and are reported for inclusion in student financial aid packages, and may reduce other financial aid the student may receive.