Before Building Laboratory selected for AN’s Best of Practice in Technology Award

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The Architect’s Newspaper (AN) recently announced the winners of the 6th annual Best of Practice Awards, “celebrating the design a studio itself” and recognizing the top companies and practices across North America that are thoughtfully shaping the built environment. 

Selected as Best of Practice in Technology, Before Building Laboratory (co-founded and co-directed by architecture professors Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann), is the first university lab to be honored as part of this prestigious awards program. 

For AN’s awards program, a panel of jurors analyzed submissions across portfolio, office culture, and social impact. “A sense of place emerged as a winning through-line, uniting many of the winners and finalists. These firms engaged in community…and the work reflects this consideration to local specificity. Forms and materials are put in dialog with the site and city.”
 

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Editor in Chief, Jack Murphy, acknowledged Before Building Laboratory’s forward-looking impact. “This academic lab unites digital technology with low-carbon wood solutions. This is important research for the future of the profession.”

Before Building Laboratory (BBL) is an academic research laboratory that invents and builds low-cost ground-up construction technologies and redeploys existing technologies to improve accessibility for architects. These technologies enable new spatial potentials for renewable grown materials in construction including timber, bamboo, grass, various invasive plant species, and hemp. 

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BBL’s inventions include a robotic bandsaw sawmill (patent pending) capable of producing non-planar, curving, angular, and twisting lumber, and a pneumatic forming machine (patent pending) that makes use of air as a reusable formwork for casting complex curvatures and eliminating materially wasteful molds. Through these inventions, BBL is building expertise in digital processing strategies for novel timber construction. 

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The lab’s work, which has received many recognitions and has been widely exhibited, brings academic research to industry and practice through patented technologies and public-facing full-scale material prototypes. Most recently, BBL received a National Science Foundation Grant to advance their robotic sawmilling technology towards commercialization and was awarded a cross-institutional 4-VA Collaborative Research Grant to pioneer new approaches to increasing the efficiency and viability of urban wood in sustainable construction. 

The Architect's Newspaper 
2026 Best of Practice Awards
Jury

Gerdo Aquino
Co-CEO and Principal
SWA

Phillip Bernstein
Deputy Dean and Professor in the Practice
Yale School of Architecture

Hervé Descottes
Principal and Founder
L’Observatoire International

Elizabeth Lowrey
Principal
Elkus Manfredi Architects

Thomas Robinson
Founding Principal
LEVER Architecture

Melissa Wong
Principal
Thornton Tomasetti

Isabel Ling
Managing Editor
The Architect’s Newspaper

Jack Murphy
Editor in Chief
The Architect’s Newspaper
 

The Architect's Newspaper 
Best of Practice in Technology Award
Before Building Laboratory

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The Before Building Laboratory (BBL) pioneers new construction assemblies with renewable, carbon-sequestering materials. Led by Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, BBL's work reimagines constraints on material economies and labor. BLL makes use of consumer-grade technologies and invents their own low-cost ground-up systems to make it easier to work with natural materials, including the invention of a robotic sawmill capable of producing non-planar lumber and a reusable pneumatic forming machine.