United States Artists yesterday celebrated the 54 USA Fellows for 2012 at a gala at The Getty Center in Los Angeles. Fellowship grants of $50,000 each were awarded to outstanding talent in the disciplines Architecture & Design, Crafts & Traditional Arts, Dance, Literature, Media, Music, Theater Arts, and Visual Arts.

The six fellows for 2012 in the Architecture & Design category are Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto of New York firm Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture; Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich of LA-based practice P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S; Stephen Luoni, Director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center; and landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE. For the complete list of fellows in all disciplines click here.

Marcelo Spina & Georgina

USA Grigor
California

Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich founded their architecture firm, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, in Los Angeles in 1999. In their practice, they integrate digital technology with an extensive consideration of form and innovative materials. Working at various scales, they have recently completed a ten-story apartment building in Rosario, Argentina, and a mix-use corporate headquarters in Chengdu, China. Among their many honors are awards from both the Architectural League of New York (2011) and the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles Chapter (2011). Huljich is on the architecture and urban design faculty of UCLA, and Spina is on the design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto

USA Booth Fellow
New York

Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto started their internationally recognized firm, Reiser + Umemoto, RUR Architecture, in New York in 1986. Reiser and Umemoto work at various scales from furniture design to residential and commercial buildings to landscape design and infrastructure. They established their firm as “an innovative laboratory in which significant social, cultural and structural ideas are synthesized into a tangible, dynamic architecture.” Reiser is a Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, and Umemoto has taught at various schools in the U.S. and Asia, including Harvard, Hong Kong, and Columbia Universities, as well as The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Stephen Luoni

USA Ford Fellow
Arkansas 

Stephen Luoni is the Director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC), a non-profit that specializes in interdisciplinary public works projects combining landscape, urban, and architectural design with a focus on shaping urban design approaches to issues of sustainability. Luoni’s design and research have won him more than 80 honors, including Progressive Architecture Awards and American Institute of Architects Honor Awards.

Kate Orff

USA Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Fellow
New York

Landscape architect Kate Orff founded her firm, SCAPE, in 2004. With a background in environmental science, the political and social sciences, and fine arts, she merges ecology and strong form to create rich, bio-diverse, textured landscapes that magnify the relationship between people and place. SCAPE’s projects range from a pocket park in Brooklyn to a 1000-acre landfill regeneration project in Dublin, Ireland. Orff is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University and the director of its Urban Landscape Lab.