--- title: "The Internet Archive’s Hero Award Is a Hollow Plastic Building With a Library Inside" description: "Designer Taekyeom Lee printed it in bioplastic; on October 21 it goes to Poynter and Investigative Reporters and Editors" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-14T12:00:00Z modified: 2026-10-15T05:15:24Z url: https://rews.cc/a/the-internet-archive-s-hero-award-is-a-hollow-plastic-buildi-4e244f language: en tags: ["3d-printing", "internet-archive", "open-source", "design", "education", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # The Internet Archive’s Hero Award Is a Hollow Plastic Building With a Library Inside *Designer Taekyeom Lee printed it in bioplastic; on October 21 it goes to Poynter and Investigative Reporters and Editors* By Jan Sokol · October 14, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-internet-archive-s-hero-award-is-a-hollow-plastic-buildi-4e244f ## In brief - Indiana University designer Taekyeom Lee 3D-printed the Internet Archive’s Hero Award, a 120mm model of its San Francisco building - The hollow bioplastic trophy holds a USB drive; Tim Berners-Lee’s 2025 drive held archives of his 1990 CERN website - During a 2021 residency, Lee built an open-source clay 3D printer to recreate vases from a 1966 book on Korean ceramics - A University of Waterloo student, Ryan Zhang, built the printer in 2023 using Lee’s video tutorials - The 2026 award goes to the Poynter Institute and IRE for preserving local news, at a ceremony in San Francisco on October 21 A trophy tells you something about the people who hand it out. Gold cups talk about victory. Marble talks about permanence. The trophy the Internet Archive will hand over in San Francisco on October 21 is made of polylactic acid, a bioplastic made from corn. It stands 120 millimetres tall, about 4.7 inches. It is hollow and light. It is a model of the Archive’s own building on Funston Avenue, and inside it there is a slot for a USB drive. As [Caralee Adams wrote on the Internet Archive’s blog](https://blog.archive.org/2026/10/14/building-the-hero-award/), the object is the work of Taekyeom Lee, an associate professor of graphic design at Indiana University Bloomington. It began life in 2022 as the trophy for a Democracy’s Library award. It was later reworked for the 2025 Internet Archive Hero Award. The drive is the whole idea. It is loaded with files chosen for each recipient. The 2025 award went to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and [Brewster Kahle presented it to him on October 9, 2025](https://blog.archive.org/2025/11/05/celebrating-sir-tim-berners-lee-2025-internet-archive-hero-award-recipient/), when the Archive was marking one trillion archived web pages. His drive held Wayback Machine copies of his original website at CERN from 1990. The man who invented the web was handed the web’s first page back, stored inside a plastic building. The slot came out of a conversation with Kahle, who had shown Lee an old trophy package that came with a USB drive. > “It’s a trophy, but at the same time it’s the library itself.” ![A miniature classical library with columns and bookshelves incorporates a large USB plug, set against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/ba34e835e13e19c62b27e3dcaf15d1b7c6711a0e.webp) ## From the page back to clay Lee is 42. He was the first in his family to go to college, and he came to the United States from South Korea in 2011 for graduate school. He earned an MFA in graphic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2021 he was an artist-in-residence at the Archive in San Francisco, and he wanted to take the art he found in its collection off the page and the screen and make it into things people could touch. He started with a book on Korean ceramics published in 1966. He traced the shapes of the vessels, turned them into 3D models and built his own 3D printer, based on the open-source RepRap project, that printed small clay vases. Look at the route those shapes travelled. Potters made them by hand. Then they were photographed, printed in a book, shelved, scanned into a digital collection, and finally pressed out in clay again by a machine built from a free plan. Each step lost something, and the last step won some of it back. “The goal of the Archive is to gather data and archive as much as it can to share with a broader community,” Lee said. “But everything has been digitized.” So he asked what would happen if the Archive’s digital data could be made into objects “so we can actually touch it,” in order to “restore healthy relationship between the digital and physical worlds.” ![A round terracotta vase with horizontal ridges transitions into an open triangular wire lattice on its left side against a peach background.](https://rews.cc/img/378dc234eaf4d7396dd936fcd46e380386172ebd.webp) ## Bolt by bolt He filmed the build as a series of videos with an open-source plan, so that others could make the same clay printer. “I really enjoy the process of sharing it as open source,” he said. In 2023 someone did. Ryan Zhang, a civil engineering student at the University of Waterloo in Canada, followed the plan, built the machine and wrote about it on LinkedIn. “His easy-to-follow YouTube tutorials and a general guide to how the printer should function were of great help,” Zhang wrote. “It really made my day. I was so happy,” Lee said. “It was my goal to share the knowledge – and it actually reached someone.” He still uses the Archive heavily. He reads its vintage art books and relies on it as a credible source for his research and teaching, which deals with unusual materials and digital methods for making 3D graphics and designed objects. He uses the Wayback Machine to study how graphical user interfaces and usability have changed over time. A retinal detachment left him with lingering vision problems, and since then he has taken a close interest in visual accessibility for people with low vision. ## The newspapers that vanish This year the trophy goes to journalists. The Archive announced that the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors will share the 2026 Hero Award [for their leadership in preserving local news online](https://blog.archive.org/2026/10/05/internet-archive-to-honor-poynter-institute-and-investigative-reporters-and-editors-with-2026-hero-award-for-preserving-local-news-online/). The award is to be presented at the Archive’s annual celebration, “Democracy’s Library: Tools for Participation,” in San Francisco and on a livestream. Earlier recipients include the island nation of Aruba, the public-information advocate Carl Malamud, the copyright expert Michelle Wu and the Grateful Dead. ![A rolled newspaper surrounds a metal cylinder, with its circular silver end exposed, resting on a muted purple surface.](https://rews.cc/img/fd7f288ee3874a66c0d5958ca1a156133043b08a.webp) Both organisations are about fifty years old. With the Archive, and with support from Press Forward, they run a programme called *Today’s News for Tomorrow*. Its aim is to train hundreds of newsrooms in digital preservation and give them access to the Archive’s web-archiving services. According to [IRE’s announcement](https://www.ire.org/2026/10/05/ire-recognized-as-a-champion-of-preserving-local-news-online-with-the-2026-internet-archive-hero-award/), the training began in March 2026. Poynter’s own statement gave the reason in plain words. It said the field had watched “billionaires shut down newsrooms and disappear their websites,” and had seen newsrooms “lose decades of digital archives because of tech fumbles,” as [the institute put it in its release](https://www.poynter.org/news-release/2026/poynter-wins-national-hero-award-for-work-to-preserve-news-archives/). Here is a reflection, not a finding. Owners rarely need to censor the record. It is usually enough to stop paying for the server. A town’s paper of record can disappear in an afternoon, when someone decides a website no longer earns its hosting bill, and with it go the town’s arguments, obituaries and council votes. Against that, a group of journalism trainers holds sessions on web archiving, and a design professor prints a hollow building with room inside it for a drive. “Innovation starts from connecting dots from the past to present and to future,” Lee said. “What the Internet Archive has been doing is so valuable in making that information accessible to everyone.”