LO Design Selected as the 2026 PEA Prize Award Recipient

Congratulations to LO Design on being selected as the 2026 PEA Prize Award Recipient!

The annual Philadelphia Emerging Architect Prize recognizes a Philadelphia firm that has been established and licensed within the past ten years for its high-quality design and innovative thought. 

LO Design

Architects are trained to design buildings, but buildings are shaped long before they are passed into the hands of architects—by developers, banks, owners, community relationships, politics, and economics. If architects are absent from the early conversations where buildings and programs take form, we are only able to shape part of the outcome. Our practice was founded as an experiment in expanding that role. We work across architecture, interiors, construction, development, and long-term stewardship—sometimes as designer, builder, developer, owner, or partner. We become better architects by engaging with the full life of a project. With this approach, we preserve community voice, design intent, and hold greater agency over what gets built, how, and for whom. Across scales and typologies, five guiding principles recur in our work. 

1. Adaptation: Work with what already exists rather than default to erasure.

2. Density: Design has the potential to multiply the possibilities and relationships within a site.

3. Presence: Architecture is an expression of identity and values.

4. Threshold: The space between old and new, public and private, and one experience to another is treated as active design territory.

5. Agency: Expanding the architect’s role in the decisions that determine why and how projects happen.

These principles connect project typologies that are intentionally diverse: single and multifamily housing; retail, nonprofit, affordable housing, and high-end residential; highly detailed interiors and complex adaptive reuse.

However, consistent across our work is the rigor with which we approach each design challenge. We do not believe different clients deserve different standards of design.

We see practice itself as a design problem—something to continually test, adapt, and reform. We are not simply trying to build better buildings; we are trying to build better ways of practicing architecture.

Learn more about LO Design HERE.

Celebrate LO Design with us at the 2026 AIA Philadelphia Design Celebration! Tickets are live and can be purchased HERE.