Ragdale

Ragdale Announces Winners of the Ragdale Ring Design-Build Competition and Launch of 2026 Summer Performance Series

Ragdale is pleased to announce Virginia-based Gluten and California-based Patrick Geske & Cody Miner as winners of the 2026 & 2027 Ragdale Ring Design-Build Competition.

Selected from a record number of submissions, these projects explore architecture, landscape, and community engagement and will be used for a series of upcoming performances and public gatherings on the Ragdale campus. The selected teams will receive a $20,000 production stipend and an 18-day design-build residency for the construction of their selected designs, which will be on view mid-June through early November in 2026 and 2027 respectively.

Front of House by Gluten will be on view in 2026, coinciding with the launch of Ragdale’s 50th Anniversary. Drawing inspiration from the historic Ragdale House, Gluten’s project will re-imagine elements of the façade as a landscape of forms to be engaged through direct experience. Rather than a single stage, Front of House will be an environment where performance, gathering and architecture overlap with one another, creating a space of wonder and exploration.

Stage Prop by the collaborative team of Patrick Geske & Cody Miner will be on view in 2027, marking the close of our Anniversary year. Through the construction of a circular platform that recalls the original 1912 Ragdale Ring, the work will present a measured intervention in the landscape. At the same time, with articulated hinges and specially designed seating, the stage can transform to meet the needs of various performance contexts, preserving the garden theatre’s essential character as an open space responsive to possibility and change.

“These projects celebrate Shaw’s interest in gatherings that connect landscape, audience and creativity with structures that are playful, contemporary, engaged with history and participatory,” says John Rich, Ragdale’s Deputy Director. “We look forward to welcoming each team to campus as artists-in-residence for their design-build and congratulate them on their selection.”

The 2026 Ragdale Ring Summer Performance Series will use Front of House as a performance stage and audience seating. The series launches on June 20-21 with a world premiere dance by featured company House of DOV. Presented by Drew Lewis, Ragdale alum and creative director of House of DOV, “Circle of Apathy” explores the cycles of growth and disintegration intrinsic to nature. The dance ensemble works together to build physical structures that increase in precarity as the group strives toward expansion, while the soul-funk collective Family Junket performs in parallel.

“It is incredibly special to be selected for the Ragdale Ring,” said collaborators Miner and Geske. “Ragdale has this long history as a place where artists go to think, experiment, and make something new. For us, it’s a chance to contribute to that legacy by building a transformable piece of civic furniture that supports many forms of performance and creative exchange.”

The 2026 and 2027 Ragdale Ring Design-Build Competition was juried by Colleen M. Humer, Regin Igloria, Chris-Annmarie Spencer, Lauren Stimson and Ragdale staff.

An archive of past winners can be found at the bottom of this page. The next open call for the Ragdale Ring Competition is anticipated to be in Fall 2027.

Additional Summer performance series details and ticket information are available online here.

Inquiries about the Ragdale Ring and any Ragdale program can made to info@ragdale.org.

“Design needs spaces where ideas can be tested at full scale and in public forums. Opportunities like this support work that is experimental and playful without isolating it from constraint. Hopefully, that expands the understanding of the field by showing that architecture is as much a cultural act as it is a building practice.”

~ Gluten

Images of Front of House, courtesy of Gluten, 2026 Ragdale Ring Design-Build Competition winner

Images of Stage Prop, courtesy of Patrick Geske & Cody Miner, 2027 Ragdale Ring Design-Build Competition winners

About the Ragdale Ring

Architect Howard Van Doren Shaw designed the original 1912 Ragdale Ring as an open-air theatre to showcase the plays and poems of his wife, Frances Wells Shaw. Audiences gathered for outdoor performances on the property where the Shaws designed lighting systems, costumes and props to welcome an extended group of artists and friends, who saw Ragdale as a haven for creativity and community. These performances were hallmarks of the period and would also lay the groundwork for how future generations of artists would come to understand the transformative potential of Ragdale.  

In 2013 Ragdale launched the first design-build competition to activate the campus in new ways. Since that time, it has presented eleven dynamic open-air installations that have provided architects and designers with the opportunity to create works in a unique setting. These constructions have served as backdrops for public presentations of readings, musical performances, and theatrical productions, which encourage new ways of understanding architecture, public space, and the larger history of Ragdale.

About Gluten

Gluten is Julia McConnell and Paige Davidson, with a rotating cast of collaborators. Since 2021, the studio has been making houses, installations, short films, branding, packaging, books, animations, and furniture. The work stretches across scales and formats, often refusing to settle into a single domain.

Gluten operates in the in-between. Where architecture turns into graphics, where films behave like buildings, where client work and research blur together. The studio moves between plywood and pixels, construction sites and classrooms, digital workflows and analog mess. Sometimes the work looks polished and finished, sometimes it looks provisional or speculative. Usually it is both.

The name fits. Gluten is elastic, connective, occasionally off-limits. The studio’s projects are sticky in that way too, accumulating ideas, references, and collaborators as they go. @studiogluten

About Patrick Geske & Cody Miner

Patrick Geske is an architect, educator, and installation-based practitioner with experience spanning adaptive reuse, residential architecture, furniture, and exhibition design. He holds a Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc, where he was awarded the Gehry Prize for his graduate thesis, and a B.A. in English and Film Studies. His background informs a practice attentive to narrative, framing, and the bodily experience of space.

Geske has worked in a range of professional contexts, from large offices to craft-focused studios, and has experience in historically sensitive environments including Sea Ranch. His work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, WUHO Gallery, and Spring/Break Art Show. Formerly a director of MODEST Common, he currently teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios at Woodbury University, and is working on a range of historic renovation projects in Southern California.

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Cody Miner is a Los Angeles based designer, adjunct faculty at Woodbury University School of Architecture, and Lecturer at Cal Poly Pomona. His work is informed by contemporary questions surrounding architectural form, modes of production, and graphic modes of representation. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Additionally, he has served as co-director of MODEST Common, an art and architecture gallery in DTLA, and as Director of Wedge Gallery in Burbank. Cody's work has been exhibited at a83 Gallery, A+D Museum, LA Design Festival, and SPRING/BREAK LA. His professional experience spans both speculative and realized projects. Notably, at Zago Architecture, he contributed to projects including “A New Federal Project” for the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, as well as the VPAC facade wall for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Currently, Cody is establishing his own practice, SEMIFIRM, focused on the development of novel and humorously constructed formal strategies.

About Ragdale Ring 2026/2027 Jury

Colleen Humer

Colleen Humer is a Teaching Professor in the College of Architecture at The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) . In 2006, she came to IIT from Toronto and has spent the last 20 years in the College teaching Studio, History and Study Abroad. Colleen directs the International Programs in the College. With degrees in Fine Arts, and in Architecture from the University of British Columbia, and a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Toronto where she is currently working on a Ph.D. examining the relationship between Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Colleen’s interest in the design and history leads them to inform each other in her teaching.

Colleen has also been a collaborator on Frank Flury’s student design/build projects all around the world, but closer to home, she spent plenty of time working on Ragdale’s Meadow studio, from demolition to completion.

Regin Igloria

Regin Igloria is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in the Chicagoland area. His drawings, artists’ books, sculptures, and performances portray the human condition as it relates to the natural environment and inhabited spaces. In 2010, he founded North Branch Projects, an organization that builds connections through the book arts, which allows him to work with various communities to create crossover between disparate populations. Igloria has taught at places such as The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Marwen, Snow City Arts, and Carthage College, and recently served as Artistic Director at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL. He received a 3Arts Next Level Artist Award as well as local, national, and international grants, support through artist residencies such as Camargo Foundation and Ucross, and has exhibited internationally. He received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

Chris-Annmarie Spencer

Jamaican by birth, Chris-Annmarie Spencer received a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies from the Caribbean School of Architecture at the University of Technology before attending graduate school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chris-Annmarie is a principal at Wheeler Kearns Architects, where she has worked on many noteworthy projects including: The Alice at Goodman Theatre, Go Green Community Fresh Market in Englewood, and Inspiration Kitchen’s Garfield Park – which won ten national and local awards including the 2013 Rudy Bruner Gold Medal Award for Urban Excellence. Chris-Annmarie’s outstanding work and leadership in the profession has been recognized with many prestigious awards including the 2015 AIA Chicago Dubin Family Young Architect Award and the 2017 AIA National Young Architect Award.

Lauren Stimson

Lauren Stimson is a practicing landscape architect and a Partner at the design studio, STIMSON. Her interest in landscape, history and geology was nurtured at Bates College in Maine where she was a Benjamin E. Mays Scholar. She earned a Masters in Landscape Architecture and a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her body of work is deeply informed by Charbrook, a lifelong project that connects designers to the land, and serves as her home, studio, working farm and plant nursery that has become the rural laboratory for STIMSON. Much of her work explores buried ecologies, forgotten histories and wildness. She has served on regional, national and international design juries and lectured most recently at the New York Botanical Garden, the ASLA National Convention and the Atlantic Provinces Association of Landscape Architects. She was a 2023/2024 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and was elected to the American Society of Landscape Architects Council of Fellows in 2025.