FACT + Plain Design*Build Studios win a 2026 American Architecture Award for the Art Chapel.

FACT + Plain Design*Build studios won a 2026 American Architecture Award for the Art Chapel.

The Art Chapel is a studio and gallery for adults to cultivate their creativity through art and craft instruction, supporting public events in a community with few cultural outlets. The 1873 building, Lincoln, Nebraska’s first church, has been transformed from a neglected space into an asset for a struggling neighborhood.

By adopting a “making nothing” strategy, the project explores architecture’s ability to disarm the viewer through apparent simplicity and directness. The transformation of the simple wood-framed structure is, at first glance, perceptually mute. The primary design acts are subtractive – removing material and abstracting the building to highlight generic qualities and simple beauty. A large rolling wall replicates the original façade and opens the Art Chapel to the community both literally and figuratively. Inspired by the subtle way members of the community are invited to gather for services informally in the car park and on the church steps, the rolling wall allows the entire building to be an extension of the public realm. The form of street elevation opening is then repeated in the back of the main, multi-use room, with a new plywood cabinet wall. Custom details and furniture complete the function-driven design and rugged materiality of the renovated building.

The FACT and Plain Design*Build studios are led by professors Jeffrey L. Day, FAIA and Jason Griffiths.

Credits: List of Collaborators and Student Team can be found here:
https://www.factlab.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=3552&action=edit
Architect of Record: Actual Architectucture Co.
Photo: Walker Pickering

The American Architecture Award highlights is the most significant new contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, interiors, and urban planning in the United States

Since 1994, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press, have organized The American Architecture Awards as a way to honor the best, new significant buildings and landscape and planning projects designed and/or built in the United States and abroad by the most important American architects and planners practicing nationally and international. The American Architecture Awards give an important overview of the current aesthetic direction of today’s commercial, corporate, institutional, and residential work in the United States to the real estate, banking, business, and corporate community, as well as to the press and general public.

This makes the 7th design award to date for The Art Chapel.