Washington High School student Lacy Turner was recently announced by North Carolina Modernist Houses as one of three winners in the inaugural student category of the 2014 George Matsumoto Prize for Modern Residential Design.

Turner’s submission to the competition was the result of her drafting class’ participation in Project BauHow, an educational initiative sponsored by NCMH, according to a NCMH press release. Two other North Carolina students, Ian Price of McMichael High School and Wesley Pritzlaff of Rolesville High, were also winners.

Project BauHow provides free desktop computers and CAD (computer aided design) software to ninth and tenth grade students in drafting classes statewide who do not have access at home to computers that can support the CAD software, the release said. In exchange for the computers and software, the teachers agreed to have all of their students design a single-family Modernist house that could be submitted to the Matsumoto Prize’s student category.

“Through the establishment of Project Bauhow, North Carolina Modernist Houses is to be commended for its efforts to give high school students access to computers and technology that might otherwise be unavailable to them,” said Dennis Stallings, FAIA, who is also a professor at NCSU’s College of Design. “Giving these students the ability to experience a real design problem and execute it opens the door for many of them to potentially pursue a career in design. The students should be commended for taking on this design challenge and learning the software that allowed them to execute it.”

Turner said she originally began with drawing and that prompted her interest in design. A week into her drafting class, Turner was told about the competition by her teacher, David Dixon.

“When I heard there was a drafting competition I was like, ‘Count me in,’” Turner said. “It was a way to get my creativity out there and I loved the idea of it.”

The assignment came with imaginary details about the size of the house, the number of people in the family, each individual’s special needs and/or interests, and other information an architect would need to design a home specific to the site and the client. In this imaginary family, two sisters are moving in together with their children, one of whom is confined to a wheelchair, so accessibility was an issue.

As a result of winning the competition, NCMH is giving Turner and the other students’ scholarships to attend North Carolina State University’s well-known Design Day Camp from July 14 to July 18.

“I’m actually excited to see what we are actually going to do,” Turner said. “They really haven’t told us what we are going to do yet, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to walk us through exercises of doing AutoCAD and doing different challenges within a group. So it will be a socializing thing but also learning more about AutoCAD and how to work it a little more.”

Turner said she appreciates how Project BauHow helped her become a better drafting student and enabled her to apply her creativity to something she loves to do.

“It opened up my horizons from just drawing to actually applying it to something else that I could actually go into a career for and actually succeed in it better than I could if I was just an artist,” Turner said.

Turner plans to attend N.C. State, a choice that will open up a lot of doors for her to continue her design interests, and perhaps study architecture.

North Carolina Modernist Houses is an award-winning non-profit organization dedicated to archiving, preserving, and promoting Modernist residential design. For more information visit www.ncmodernistorg.