With Charles Moore Traveling Studio prize, Narineh Mirzaeian's Winter 2025 studio studies the global and the vernacular in Armenia

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design presented the 2024 Charles Moore Traveling Studio award to Narineh Mirzaeian for her Winter 2025 AUD advanced topics studio, "Sticks & Stones: New Expressions of Tectonic Order." Mirzaeian's studio traveled to Armenia in February 2025, visiting and studying a range of sites as students worked toward a new authenticity in architectural expression.

AUD's Charles Moore Traveling Studio award was established in 2004 to commemorate architect Charles Moore’s exemplary commitment to teaching, and to honor his belief in the unique importance of the study of place to the practice of architecture. By bringing faculty expertise to bear on their experience of other locales, it is AUD’s aspiration that students investigate firsthand the diversity of the world’s cultural and natural settings and their various impacts on the design of the built environment.

Mirzaeian's "Sticks & Stones" studio sought hybrid strategies that merge the hyper-local and the universal, exploring what architecture and design can contribute to a post-global reality.

The studio's focus was revitalizing a dilapidated historic market in the city of Gyumri (formerly Leninakan), transforming it into a vibrant culinary ecosystem. Mirzaeian encouraged deeply rooted discussions centered on distinct tectonic and ordering systems, particularly those involving the titular sticks and stones. This elemental focus not only harks back to the basics of architectural form, Mirzaeian observes, but also seeks to uncover fundamental strategies for design synthesis.

Armenia's architectural landscape reflects a rich interplay of traditional vernacular forms and modernist influences, shaped by the country’s unique historical, cultural, and geographical conditions. Throughout their travels, students visited projects spanning local vernacular architecture, as well as Classical, Neoclassical, and Soviet Modern architectural styles. The itinerary included visits to the Greco-Roman Garni Temple, constructed in the 1st century, and to multiple monastic complexes from the 4th to 13th centuries deemed UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Highlights included the Geghart Monastic Complex, a rock-cut structure which includes two interior chapels carved entirely out of the adjacent mountain. Browse the full photo gallery below.

The studio drew insights from these references to underpin design interventions for a the Gyumri historic market. Navigating between the intimately local and the broadly universal, students developed strategically synthesized design proposals, working toward a new authenticity in architectural expression.

Mirzaeian's design practice, MNOffice, is based in both Los Angeles and Yerevan, Armenia. She is a 2016-17 Fulbright Scholar and her design work has garnered various accolades, including two AIA Design Excellence Awards and the 2006 P/A Award Grand Prize. Prior to establishing MNOffice she was an Architectural Associate at Gehry Partners for nine years where she played a key role on numerous architectural projects completed and under construction internationally.

Previous Charles Moore Traveling Studio awardess include Julia Koerner for her research studio “Fit for the Future: 3D Printed Sustainable Building Skins,” investigating emerging 3D-printing technology and questioned how this innovation, combined with sustainable building materials and methods, may create risk-resilient architecture for the 21st century. Koerner and the studio traveled to Austria in January 2023. Last year, AUD awarded the prize to two studios: "Climate Caravan," led by Heather Roberge with Lori Choi, which toured Scandinavia; and MSAUD Entertainment Studio "Narrative Engineering," led by Natasha Sandmeier and Liam Denhamer, which traveled to Spain.