The Architects Foundation is proud to present the 2023 Richard Morris Hunt Prize Fellow and scholar, selected at the December 2022 jury in Washington, DC at The Octagon. Congratulations to Lurita and Marika!
Lurita McIntosh Blank, NCARB, RBEC, APT RP, has received a 6-month travel fellowship to France to study Vertical Timber Framing Practices.
Lurita is a Principal with Raths, Raths & Johnson, Inc., a national engineering, architecture, and forensics consulting firm headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. She is a Registered Architect in multiple states, a Registered Building Envelope Consultant through the International Institute of Building Enclosure Consultants (IIBEC), a Recognized Professional through the Association for Preservation Technology (APT), and holds of Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.
With a 15+ year career in architectural forensics, Lurita’s practice focuses on issues with material degradation, building performance, and water intrusion. Her expertise includes masonry, heavy timber, and roofing/waterproofing. At RRJ, Lurita leads the historic preservation and federal markets, providing investigation, diagnosis, and repair design for heritage structures across the country. Her current work includes multiple projects in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, on French colonial vertical log structures.
Marika Dalley Snider, PhD, AIA is the recipient of the 5-week scholarship whose research topic focuses on Curating Paris’s Layers through Historic Preservation.
Marika is an architect, educator, and storyteller who celebrates the small, the forgotten, and the under-appreciated architecture and its associated people through film and visualization, writing, and historic preservation.
Marika’s architectural practice spans a wide variety of small and medium-sized project types but her passion is history and historic preservation. Museum-quality restorations to state owned historic sites such as the home of former U.S. President Warren G Harding and investigative fieldwork on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House are some of her proudest work. She is equally proud of her work on historic storefronts and supporting preservation in small towns in Ohio, Utah, and Tennessee.
Marika teaches undergraduate and graduate comprehensive studios and the history of architecture series at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on virtual and augmented reality for interpretation of historic African-American neighborhoods.
Learn more about the Richard Morris Hunt Prize here.