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Michael Young Receives Arts & Letters Architecture Award

POSTED ON: March 13, 2025

Michael Young speaks at the Lincoln lectern

Professor Michael Young shares his work as part of The Cooper Union 2024 Convocation. Photo by Marget Long.

Young and Ayata, the architectural design studio co-founded by Associate Professor Michael Young, was awarded a 2025 Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters yesterday. The award recognizes American architects whose work is characterized by a strong personal direction. Young and Ayata were one of three practices selected to receive the $10,000 award. This is the latest honor for the practice, which received both the Progressive Architecture Award and an American Institute of Architects New York State Honor Award for their work on the DL1310 Apartments in Mexico City, Mexico. Young himself received a Rome Prize in 2019.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. The architecture awards will be presented alongside the art, literature, and music awards at a ceremony in May.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.