Julia Koerner, Vivila Leigh (MArch '25) among 2025 Vitruvian Honors & Awards winners

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design faculty member Julia Koerner and recent graduate Vivila Leigh (MArch ‘25) are among the winners in the 2025 Vitruvian Honors & Awards program, hosted by the Facade Tectonics Institute (FTI). Koerner and Leigh were honored at the 2025 Vitruvian Honors & Awards celebration on September 18 at the AIA Center for Architecture in New York.

Koerner is one of two winners in this cycle's Facade Educator category, while Leigh was one of three honorees in the Student Facade Project category. Leigh’s winning submission, "Kinepies," was completed as part of Koerner’s 2024-2025 research studio "Fit for the Future: 3D-Printed Sustainable Building Skins." See our gallery below for images from Koerner's studio and Leigh's project.

Now in its third cycle, FTI’s biennial Vitruvian Honors & Awards (VH&A) program celebrates outstanding projects, project teams, and individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the design, engineering, fabrication, installation, and lifecycle performance of building envelopes.

FTI writes that the VH&A Student Project Award honors students who "are showing exceptional promise, showcases these individuals and their work, and introduces them to the building industry," while the Facades Educator Award recognizes professors who demonstrate "a facade-forward approach to educating the future leaders of the building industry."

FTI praised Leigh’s winning project, "Kinepies," as "a bold leap for 3D printing." Leigh completed the project for Koerner’s 2024-2025 research studio "Fit for the Future: 3D-Printed Sustainable Building Skins," which asked students to investigate the relationship of fashion and building skins, and research how buildings of the future can have skins that are performative and are 3D-printed with innovative sustainable materials.

Observing the three student project winners, FTI writes "These three student projects, each from different universities, reveal how the next generation of architects is rethinking materials, performance, and human experience–reshaping the dialogue between design, technology, and sustainability."

Koerner is an award-winning Austrian designer, innovator, and pioneer in 3D printing, with exemplary cross-disciplinary work. She has been sought after for collaborations that include 3D-printed costumes with Ruth E. Carter for Marvel's "Black Panther" and "Wakanda Forever," earning two Academy Awards. She is internationally recognized for design innovation in 3D printing and recently was awarded for her architectural design for ICON's 3D-printed affordable housing Initiative 99. In addition to teaching at AUD and leading AUD’s Summer Programs, Koerner is the founder of JK Design and JK3D, focused on iconic, sustainable, and innovative 3D-printed architecture, installations, fashion, and home decor products.

Leigh is a 2025 graduate of AUD’s MArch program, and an aspiring digital media designer interested in new technologies as mediums of digital-to-physical translation, creative generation, and experiential simulation. She works with 3D printing and digital environment development, and has a design background in architecture. In design, she is interested in modularity, flexibility, scalability, efficiency, and demonstrable performance. She is particularly passionate about continuous advancements in building technology and sustainable development, and the role architecture plays in integrating these goals through thoughtful, responsible design, believing this is not mutually exclusive from good design, and that architects have a responsibility to demonstrate so.

Last October, Koerner presented a peer-reviewed paper on her "Fit for the Future" research at FTI’s 2024 World Congress in Salt Lake City.