Congratulations to Isaiah McDaniel, AIA, the recipient of the 2026 Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award (RRTSA)! This year’s competition, held January 29 to February 10, 2026 challenged competitors to create a rest area along the Mesabi Biking Trail in northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. The brief required an all-season space of respite serving both cyclists and highway travelers. Set within a landscape shaped by both geological formations and human mining operations, the site represents a complex microcosm of naturalistic and industrial systems.

From a field of 33 submission, the jury identified five finalists:
Michael Meer, AIA
Isaiah McDaniel, AIA
Kenos Leong, Assoc. AIA
Dantès Ha, AIA, NOMA
Jared Kaesmeyer, AIA

The 2026 jury included Karen Lu, FAIA, NOMA design director and associate principal at Snow Kreilich Architects; Matthew Tierney, AIA, research fellow and adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota Center for Sustainable Building Research and 2020 Rapson recipient; Darryl Booker, retired architect; and Wanjing Li, ASLA, founder and principal of Ping and adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota.

On Thursday, March 5, after each finalist presented their design scheme, the jury named Isaiah McDaniel, AIA, the 2026 Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award recipient. An Architect with SALA Architects, Inc., McDaniel earned his Master of Architecture from the University of Minnesota in 2023. With his travel award, McDaniel will explore parts of Eastern Europe to study and document architectural and cultural responses to seasonality through walking transects through cities and conversations with local architects. By visiting and revisiting cities like Prague and Vienna at both the height of summer and depths of winter, he hopes to draw out lessons and parallels to life and design in Minnesota.

View McDaniel’s full submission.
Learn more about the Ralph Rapson Traveling Study Award and view all the submissions.