Lo Design receives the 2026 Philadelphia Emerging Architect Prize
We are honored to be named the 2026 recipient of the Philadelphia Emerging Architect Prize (PEA Prize) by AIA Philadelphia.
Awarded annually, the PEA Prize recognizes an emerging Philadelphia architecture firm for both the quality of its design work and the ideas shaping its practice. For Lo Design, the recognition feels particularly meaningful because the studio has always been conceived as more than a conventional architectural practice.
From left to right, the Lo team includes Sasha Spriggs, Lea Litvin, Droopy (office dog), Naomi Noack, Monte Reed, Evan Litvin, and Monica Wyatt. Not pictured, Hailey Quinn.
We founded Lo Design as an experiment in expanding the architect’s role.
Buildings are shaped long before they reach the drawing board—by development models, financing, ownership, community relationships, zoning, politics, construction, and long-term stewardship. If architects participate only in the design phase, we are able to influence only part of the outcome.
Our work has increasingly pushed into those other territories. Across architecture, interiors, construction, development, and long-term ownership, we have taken on different roles depending on what a project requires: architect, builder, developer, owner, advocate, or partner. We believe that engaging with more of the forces that shape the built environment ultimately makes us better architects.
That approach has produced a body of work intentionally difficult to categorize. We work on single-family houses and multifamily housing, highly detailed interiors and complex adaptive reuse, retail spaces, nonprofit organizations, cultural projects, and community development. The budgets, clients, and programs vary considerably, but the standard of design does not.
Across that work, five ideas continue to recur: adaptation, density, presence, threshold, and agency. They describe not a particular architectural style, but a way of working—one that values what already exists, looks for opportunities to intensify relationships within a site, understands architecture as an expression of identity, pays close attention to moments of transition, and continually asks where architects can have greater agency in determining what gets built and why.
The PEA Prize arrives at an important moment for Lo Design. Our studio continues to grow, our work continues to expand in scale and typology, and we are increasingly interested in architecture not only as the design of buildings, but as the design of the systems through which buildings become possible.
We are deeply grateful to AIA Philadelphia for this recognition, to the clients and collaborators who have trusted us to test these ideas through real projects, and especially to the Lo Design team whose rigor, curiosity, and persistence continue to shape the practice.
The award reinforces a question we intend to keep asking:
What if architectural practice itself is a design problem?
