Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, is the recipient of the 2024 Carter Manny Research Award.

From the 1920s to the 1940s thousands of public pools were built in the United States. Where public pools had once been sites of leisure for the burgeoning middle classes, white swimmers largely abandoned municipal pools when Black people gained admittance to them through protests and lawsuits. “Swimming Pools, Civil Rights, and the American City in the 1960s” proposes that Black civil rights protests that took place at swimming pools contesting unjust racial and spatial segregation had the potential to radically transform the symbolic and physical built environment of American cities. Beyond illustrating how and why swimming pools became sites of political contestation during the height of the civil rights movement, this dissertation posits that Black protesters’ collective actions reshaped space in the image of their political demands, offering radical spatial alternatives for a liberated future.

Arièle Dionne-Krosnick is a PhD candidate in architecture at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her research and curatorial work focuses primarily on contemporary architecture and design as it relates to broader sociopolitical issues. She was a curatorial assistant in the department of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, where she coordinated the Young Architects Program annual competition at MoMA/MoMA PS1, and worked on exhibitions such as Reconstructions (2021), Frank Lloyd Wright at 150 (2017), and Insecurities (2016). Dionne-Krosnick previously worked at the Chicago Architecture Biennial and at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago. She completed her BFA in art history and studio arts (2012) at Concordia University, Montreal and holds an MA in visual and critical studies (2014) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.