Students’ Designs for New Delhi, Washington Earn Professional Recognition

One entry looks halfway around the globe to bring fresh life to the Yamuna River in India’s capital, New Delhi, while the other imagines a new kind of museum in the heart of America’s capital city.

Facing competition with architecture firms around the region, University of Virginia School of Architecture graduate students Joe Brookover and Mohamed Ismail each garnered honors in the 2016 Unbuilt Awards, run by the Washington, D.C. chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The awards recognize design ideas that push conceptual exploration and innovation and generate new discussion in design thinking.  

Brookover was one of two entrants to receive an Honor Award and the only student to earn that distinction. His submission offers a glimpse of the School of Architecture’s long-term research initiative, “Re-Centering Delhi,” a three-year collaboration developing urban planning solutions for the Indian capital.

Ismail’s design, called “Collecting the World (as we know it),” was one of two student entries to win a Merit Award, awarded to seven entries in total. His theoretical design for a new Smithsonian Institution museum on the National Mall sprang from one of his classes at UVA, which asked students to imagine how the institution might develop a museum on a vacant site.

UVA Today caught up with Brookover and Ismail, both master’s students, to learn more about their designs, shown in the renderings below.