Assistant Professor Earns Prestigious Architecture Award for Reusable Design

Resting on a small hill in Bethel, New York—the location of the infamous 1969 Woodstock festival—is the 2026 ACSA Faculty Design Award-winning project created by College of Architecture Assistant Professor Dillon Pranger.  

Titled BoardWalk, this temporary 40-foot-long installation serves as a multifunctional informal gathering space, temporary stage, and viewing platform. Its unique design, comprised of only repurposed materials, is meant to be dismantled as easily and quickly as it was put together. Assembly of the project then took place during summer 2023 for the annual Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival, hosted by the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. 

Before his appointment at Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture, Pranger was teaching as a visiting critic at Cornell University when he connected with a developer looking to reuse elements of an old iron works building in Ithaca, New York. He discovered that each floor of the four-story building was built of old-growth eastern hemlock beams and red oak flooring that were slated for demolition. “They were just going to discard it,” he says.  

Working with longtime collaborator Christopher Battaglia, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Houston, and student research assistants from Cornell University, Pranger and his team designed and built BoardWalk intending that its material makeup would mirror its overall purpose: to demonstrate that deconstruction can lead to reconstruction. With the help of a contractor, Pranger and his team removed the materials from the demolition site, extracted the embedded mechanical fasteners (such as nails, screws, etc.), and processed the wood.  

Then, employing a series of unique joinery techniques that allow each wood element to carefully stack and interlock with one another without any fasteners or adhesives—a configuration almost reminiscent of stacked, intersecting Lincoln Logs—the team built the new structure. The only other material used in the design was recycled nylon strapping that fastened around critical connecting points, offering further stabilization of the structure and a hammock-like surface stretching across the top to sit on. The installation was only supposed to be at the site for three months. Three years later, it still stands. 

The project’s creativity, use of sustainable practices, and innovative design process earned Pranger and his team the award from the prestigious Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) in the Faculty Design category. 

“The fact that it has endured three seasons of snow, rain, sleet, and hail and still looks as good as it did when it was first installed, serves as a proof-of-concept to this idea that if [an installation] is considered temporary, there is a possibility to think about ideas of design for disassembly and/or reversible connection details at a building scale,” Pranger adds. 

Pranger will be presented with the award on March 27, 2026, at the ACSA 114th Annual Meeting, an international conference hosted by different architecture schools each year. This year’s conference will take place in Chicago, with the College of Architecture set to co-host.  

“[The award] not only acknowledges the importance of sustainability, material reuse, and the circular economy as they relate to architectural design,” says Pranger, “but also signifies that Illinois Institute of Technology and the College of Architecture are at the forefront of these topics.” 

Image: Aerial shot of BoardWalk in Bethel, New York.