Architecture’s Troy Schaum wins pair of national awards

Troy Schaum, an assistant professor of architecture, has won two national awards, one for educational initiatives at the Rice School of Architecture and a second for his architectural practice, SCHAUM/SHIEH.

Troy Schaum

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) honored Schaum with its Creative Achievement Award. One of the organization’s annual Architectural Education Awards, it recognizes “a specific creative achievement in teaching, design, scholarship, research or service,” according to the ACSA announcement.

The winners will be recognized at the ACSA’s annual meeting in Seattle in March.

Schaum was honored for founding and coordinating the Rice School of Architecture’s Totalization Studios, in which students are required to carry a project from conception to the verge of construction, accounting for documentation, accessibility and safety, sustainability, cost analysis and specifications, materials and financing.

“The aim of the Totalization Studios is to eliminate the distinction between speculation and practice in each student’s final project,” Schaum wrote in his award submission. Students in three studios at Rice and one at the Rice School of Architecture Paris work closely with consultants to “challenge conventions” and push boundaries.

The second award came from the American Institute of Architects New York, which named Schaum’s practice as one of six winners of its New Practices New York competition, which honored firms able to “embrace unknowns, cultivate new opportunities, challenge assumptions and find new ways to leverage architectural thinking to shape the city.”

Schaum is co-founder of SCHAUM/SHIEH, based in New York and Houston. Through the firm, he has worked on a master plan and several building renovations for the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas; a pop music center in Taiwan; and an alternative urban plan for Detroit. Schaum is the architect of the White Oak Music Hall in Houston, a multistage performance facility expected to open in April. His firm’s design of the TransArt Gallery across from the Menil Collection on West Alabama Street in Houston will break ground this month.