2025 Lawrence Israel Prize Lecture: INC Architecture and Design

The Interior Design Department honors INC Architecture and Design with its 2025 Lawrence Israel Prize. The prize, endowed by the architect Lawrence J. Israel, has been given annually since 1998 to an individual or firm whose ideas and work enrich FIT Interior Design students’ course of study.

Adam Rolston, one of INC’s three founding partners, creative and managing director, AIA, will accept the award and deliver a talk titled “Architectures of Community,” during which he will address the role of design as a medium for cultural self-definition, social resistance, and political discourse.

INC is a passionate, open-source, multi-disciplinary, architecture, and design studio dedicated to the integration of the design disciplines. A tripartite leadership structure guides the firm’s projects from conception to completion and balances the three essential elements of design: joy, utility, and craft. The firm unlocks the creative process to engage clients and collaborators because good ideas can come from anywhere. Each project is a unique portrait imbued with the aspirations of its clientele. The company asserts that a project can take its place in the environment of a city or in the heart of its user by creating a meaningful dialogue with its physical and cultural conditions. At INC wellness and sustainability are a single integrated discipline because what’s good for the planet is good for the human and vice versa.

Prior awardees include Annabelle Selldorf, Karim Rashid, Lot-ek, David Rockwell, Gaetano Pesce, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Tony Chi, and Joel Sanders.

This event is free and open to the public.