Applications are now being accepted for the 2025 SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize on Race and the Built Environment.

The prize, a collaboration between the Society of Architectural Historians, Places Journal, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, supports original public scholarship that considers race and the built environment through a contemporary lens. There are no geographical restrictions; proposals on global and transnational subjects are welcome.

Award Details

The winner of the 2025 SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize will receive an honorarium of $5,000 to produce a major work of public scholarship, to be published in Places Journal and presented as a public lecture through the co-sponsorship of the SAH and the Graham Foundation. The recipient will have a period of 18 months to complete the article and develop the lecture. During this time, the recipient may be asked to participate in select SAH programming and may plan additional workshops or events within the Society, if desired. Travel and accommodation associated with the public lecture will be funded in addition to the honorarium.

Award Timeline

July 2025: Prize recipient announced.
July 2025 – June 2026: Research and development of lecture and article.
July 2026 – October 2026: Publication of article and presentation of public lecture.

Criteria for Application

The SAH | Places | Graham Foundation prize is open to mid-career, senior, and independent scholars who demonstrate a strong commitment to public scholarship.

Application Requirements

1. A cover letter outlining the significance of the proposed topic.
2. A brief proposal describing your prospective article, no more than 500 words.
3. Two or three samples of published writing, including a work of public scholarship, if possible.
4. An up-to-date CV, no longer than five pages.

Application documents should be assembled into a single PDF in the above numerical order.

Application Deadline

Applications must be submitted through Dropbox (linked here) in a single PDF with the naming convention “SAHPlacesGrahamPrize_LastName_FirstName” no later than 11:59 pm Central Standard Time on Monday, April 28, 2025.

Selection Process

The award recipient will be notified in July 2025. Applications will be evaluated by the Prize Review Committee, which will be composed of representatives from the SAH, the Graham Foundation, and Places Journal. Prospective applicants are encouraged to read the previous SAH | Places | Graham Foundation prize-winning essay in Places, and to browse the journal website, including the statement on public scholarship. We also encourage applicants to read about the SAH IDEAS Initiative on the SAH website.

About the SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize

The prize, initially called the SAH | Places Prize, was envisioned by Charles L. Davis, II, co-founder of the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group. The SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group was established by the Society of Architectural Historians in 2019 to promote research activities that analyze the racial discourses of architectural history, past and present. The group’s activities promote a race-conscious architectural history that analyzes the constitutive role of race thinking in the social construction and representation of cultural differences.

SAH, Places Journal, and the Graham Foundation strive to develop an inclusive academic culture that promotes the dissemination of pioneering research produced by both new entrants and senior scholars in the field. The goals of the SAH | Places | Graham Foundation Prize are threefold: to create a platform for existing and new scholarship in the field; to reach new publics for this work; and to develop mentorships and networking opportunities for graduate students and junior scholars.

Image: Top, L to R: Jesse Hill, 1973. [Atlanta History Center] Roof construction by students at Tuskegee Institute, ca. 1902. [Library of Congress] Puerto Rican Festival, New York City, 2015. [B.C. Lorio, via Flickr, CC 2.0] Middle, L to R: Lincoln Beach, ca. 2019. [Cheree Franco] Construction of Golden State Mutual home office building, Los Angeles. [UCLA Library Special Collections] Road in Philadelphia. [Kelly via Pexels] Bottom, L to R: W. Ray Matthewson in Princeville, North Carolina, ca. 1960s. [Edgecombe County Memorial Library] Robert C. Weaver, 1964. [LBJ Library, via Wikimedia] Tabby cabins of enslaved people, Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida. [Jola Idowu]

 

Galleries & Bookshop open: 12–5 p.m

Visit Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines curated by Mark Wasiuta through Mar 15, 2025

 

The Graham Foundation presents Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, a concise yet rich examination of Frederick Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. The output of Kiesler’s Laboratory included research, design studies, and drawings that probed the possibilities of his theory of biotechnique, while reflecting on the relation between design, energy, and the human body (its posture, respiration rates, and image consciousness). The exhibition highlights two of Kiesler’s most essential and ambitious projects developed at the Laboratory: the Mobile Home Library and the Vision Machine. Together these projects illustrate the fantastical scope and applications of Kiesler’s correalism: a design approach he conceived to “express the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments.”

Central to the exhibition is Kiesler’s important but previously unrealized Mobile Home Library, fabricated and presented in its entirety. This dynamic device proposed to improve basic domestic activities, while also radically altering domestic space. In its most iconic form, the library appears as a circular series of bookshelves; the entire piece is ambulatory, with each module also designed to spin within the Library’s ring frame. The exhibition also includes Kiesler’s drawings and studies for his Vision Machine, an ambitious device intended to visualize human sight—from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and dream images. The selection of more than 100 drawings, photographs, and research studies of these projects will illuminate Kiesler’s remarkable attempts to grasp human vision, record dreams, and to correlate libraries, information, images, and consciousness.

Frederick Kiesler was born into a Jewish family in present-day Ukraine in 1890. He first studied printmaking and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts but would later gain a venerable reputation as an inventive and dynamic theater set designer. In 1923, Kiesler joined de Stijl on the invitation of Theo van Doesburg, making him the group’s youngest member. After immigrating to the United States and settling in New York City in 1926, among other projects, Kiesler designed store windows for Saks Fifth Avenue, the Guild Cinema, and Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery. He was also appointed as the director of scenic design at the Juilliard School of Music as well as director of his laboratory at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Kiesler’s experiments with correalism, biotechnique, enveloping space, Magic Architecture, human perception, and energy, underscore the rich multiplicity of his architectural vision.

This exhibition marks Kiesler’s return to the Graham Foundation; in 1957 he was awarded one of the inaugural Graham Foundation Fellowships, shortly after the Foundation was established in 1956. Through the fellowship, Kiesler was invited to Chicago in 1958 to present his research and participate in seminars alongside other fellows, including painter Wilfredo Lam, future Pritzker Prize-winning architects Balkrishna V. Doshi and Fumihiko Maki, and sculptor Eduardo Chillida, among others.

Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines is organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

The Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport (BMKOES) supported the preparation of the exhibition with a grant to the Kiesler Foundation, thus making the preparatory work for the exhibition possible.

The exhibition is curated by Mark Wasiuta; designed by Wasiuta, Farah Alkhoury, and Tigran Kostandyan; and fabricated by Powerhouse Arts Makers.

Mark Wasiuta is senior lecturer in architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and codirector of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, NYSCA, and the Graham Foundation, where he was an inaugural Graham Foundation Fellow. His research exhibition practice focuses on architecture’s media, politics, and environments through under-examined projects of the postwar period. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Graham Foundation, LAXArt, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Sharjah Architecture Triennale, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, MAXXI, the Deste Foundation, the Luma Foundation, Moderna Museet, and elsewhere. Recent Exhibitions include Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines at the Jewish Museum in New York City and The Machine at the Heart of Man: Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, Greece. Wasiuta is coauthor and coeditor of Rifat Chadirj: Building Index (Arab Image Foundation, 2018); Dan Graham’s New Jersey (Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), and author of numerous articles.

The Jewish Museum is an art museum committed to illuminating the complexity and vibrancy of Jewish culture for a global audience. Through distinctive exhibitions and programs that present the work of diverse artists and thinkers, the Jewish Museum shares ideas, provokes dialogue, and promotes understanding. It is focused on the interplay between artistic practice—contemporary and historical—with a peerless collection reflecting global Jewish identity and tradition, ancient times to present day. Founded in 1904, the Museum has a global reputation for the quality of its collection, exhibitions, and scholarship. Located on Manhattan's famous Museum Mile, the Museum serves more than 200,000 annual visitors of all religious and cultural backgrounds.

The Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna was founded in 1997, after the Republic of Austria and the city of Vienna, with the help of numerous private benefactors, had acquired the descendant’s estate of Frederick Kiesler. It is its objective to explore the heritage of this Austro-American architect (1890-1965) and to ascribe it to the contemporary canon of architectural and artistic practice. In his attempt to achieve a symbiosis of artistic and social domains, Kiesler was oriented towards an interdisciplinary combination of theory and practice. He was active in the various disciplines of architecture, visual arts, design and theatre. The Kiesler Foundation Vienna develops its interdisciplinary and transmedial activities based on this holistic way of thinking. Research projects, symposia and exhibitions examine Kiesler’s oeuvre and its historical impact, attending to aspects of historical inquiry, as well as of contemporary cultural discourse.

Special thanks to Gerd Zillner, director of the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

The organizers of the exhibition would like to thank Claudia Gould, who developed this project when she was director of the Jewish Museum. Additionally, the Graham Foundation would like to thank James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of the Jewish Museum, as well as Darsie Alexander, Jody Heher, Maureen Merrigan, Kristina Parsons, and Jennifer Roberts.

At the Graham Foundation, the exhibition is organized by Sarah Herda, director, with Ava Barrett, Alexandra Lee Small, and James Pike. Production support by Andrew Kephart, –ism Furniture; Jeremy Gender, Powerhouse Arts; Ron Konow; Michael Savona, and Crozier Fine Arts.

RELATED PROGRAM

Mark Wasiuta, Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines
CURATOR TALK
November 7, 2024, 6 p.m.

learn more, register to attend

 

Announcing the award of $390,000 to support 33 projects led by organizations around the world—including exhibitions, publications, and other public presentations—that foster the development and exchange of ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society, furthering the mission of the Graham Foundation. These projects expand understanding, methods, and platforms of contemporary architecture discourse and feature work by architects, archivists, artists, curators, designers, educators, and other professionals working with organizations worldwide in cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Nashville, Athens, New York, and Chicago where the Graham Foundation is based.

The new grantees join a global network of organizations and individuals that the Graham Foundation has supported since its founding in 1956. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than $44 million in direct support to over 5,100 projects by organizations and individuals.

The complete list of the 2024 organizational grantees follows, and descriptions of the awarded projects begin on page 4. To learn more about the new grants, click on any grantee name below to visit their online project page, or go to grahamfoundation.org/grantees.

EXHIBITIONS 

a83 (New York)
a83 Exhibition Program, 2024–25

The Architectural League of New York (New York)
Living Legend: Cross Bronx

Carnegie Museum of Art—Heinz Architectural Center (Pittsburgh, PA)
Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: City of Rooms

Center for Architecture (New York)
Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture

Citygroup (New York)
Citygroup Exhibition and Debate Program, 2025

Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles)
Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design

Hunter College Art Galleries (New York)
Andrea Blum: BIOTA

LIGA—Space for Architecture (Mexico City)
LIGA Exhibition Program, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph

Prospect New Orleans (New Orleans)
Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home

Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York)
Swamplands

Swiss Institute (New York)
Energies

FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA PROJECTS 

Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal)
Groundwork: A Film Series on Alternative Modes of Engagement in Architecture

Critical Design Lab (Vanderbilt University) and The DisOrdinary Architecture Project (Nashville, TN)
Disability Meets Architecture: A Translational Repository for Critical Accessible Practice

Innovando la Tradición (Oaxaca, Mexico)
LEOPOLDO. Living Treasures Series

PUBLIC PROGRAMS 

City College of New York—J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures (New York)
ARCH at Sixty: Bridging Past Visions with Present Realities

di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art and California Indian Museum and Cultural Center (Napa, CA)
Towards an Archaeology of the Future

The Funambulist (Paris)
The Funambulist Conversations

Lampo (Chicago)
Lampo Concert Series at the Graham Foundation

The World Around (New York)
The World Around Summit 2025

PUBLICATIONS

Borderless Studio and MAS Context (Chicago and San Antonio, TX)
Beyond Closure: Reimagining Possibilities for Chicago’s Closed Schools

Boulouki Itinerant Workshop (Athens)
Under the Landscape: Disciplinary Convergences and Emerging Alliances of Worlding

Brazilian Institute of Architects—Sao Paulo Department (Brasília, Brazil)
Terra

Chimurenga (Cape Town, South Africa)
African Mobilities – A Library of Circulations

Deem Journal (Los Angeles and New York)
Deem Journal, Issue 6: Inventing the Institution

INSITE (San Diego, CA)
INSITE Journal_07: A Timeless Way to Build

The Jewish Museum (New York)
Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines

Rice University—School of Architecture (Houston)
PLAT 14

Syracuse University—School of Architecture (Syracuse, NY)
Ethical Narratives: Essays by Richard Ingersoll (1949–2021)

University of California, Los Angeles—Department of Architecture and Urban Design (Los Angeles)
POOL, Issue No. 10

University of Illinois at Chicago—School of Architecture (Chicago)
Pollen – The UIC/SoArch Journal #2

University of the Witwatersrand—School of Arts (Johannesburg, South Africa)
ellipses [spatial praxis]: Critical Perspectives in Publishing Creative Research

Urban Design Forum and The Architectural League of New York (New York)
New City Critics

 

Image: Photographer unknown, “Participant in fantasy environment exercise in Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman’s course ‘Women and the Built Environment: Personal, Social, and Professional Perceptions,’ at the first session of the Women's School of Planning and Architecture,” Biddeford, Maine, August 1975. Photograph, 6 x 9 in. Courtesy Women's School of Planning and Architecture Records, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. From the 2024 grant to Center for Architecture for the exhibition “Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture”

The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the 2024 Carter Manny Awards for dissertations and research by doctoral candidates. Through this annual program, the Graham supports work that contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The winner of the 2024 Carter Manny Writing Award is Y. L. Lucy Wang, Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the winner of the 2024 Carter Manny Research Award is Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. These projects, along with six citations of special recognition, were selected by an external panel of scholars.

Examining building codes in Hong Kong, hospital construction in Manchuria and Beijing, and modernist Chinese gardens in Shanghai, Wang’s dissertation, “Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949,” asks how the merging of medical and architectural expertise shaped the project of modernity in the Sinosphere.

Dionne-Krosnick’s dissertation, “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.

The Carter Manny Award program—named for architect Carter H. Manny (1918–2017) in recognition of his contributions to the Graham Foundation, as founding trustee in 1956, director from 1971–93, and as director emeritus—has granted 45 awards and 201 citations representing over $1 million in support of this important student work since its establishment in 1996. In 2024, the award acknowledgement increased: the Writing Award is $25,000 and the Research Award is $20,000.

The 2024 Carter Many Awards panel included Pep Avilés, associate professor of architecture, College of Arts and Architecture, Stuckeman School, Pennsylvania State University; Joseph R. Hartman, associate professor of art history, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City; and Adair Rounthwaite, associate professor of art history and chair of the division of art history, School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington.

Below is the full list of the 2024 Carter Manny Award winners and citations of special recognition. Learn more about the history of the award and browse a selection of past winners on the Foundation’s website.

2024 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD

Y. L. Lucy Wang
“Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949”
Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology

2024 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD

Arièle Dionne-Krosnick
“Swimming Pools, Civil Rights, and the American City in the 1960s”
McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture

2024 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Yara Saqfalhait
“Building at a Distance: Architecture, Contractual Techniques, and Economies of Trust in the Late Ottoman Empire 1876–1930”
Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
This dissertation offers an account of transformations in the technical and procedural aspects of building at a distance from the imperial capital in the late Ottoman empire, as they were shaped by simultaneous processes of administrative centralization and economic liberalization.

Ecem Saricayir
“Property in Migration: The Making and Unmaking of the South Caucasus, 1878–1955”
Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; History of Architecture and Urban Development
Studying the material transformation and discursive production of the built environment of the South Caucasus alongside processes of forced and voluntary migration by focusing on shifting regimes of property in the region, this dissertation examines the dissolution of the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the emergence of nation-states from 1878 to 1955.

Shivani Shedde
“Projections of Possibility: Architectural Imaginaries of Afro-Asian Solidarity 1947–1977”
Princeton University, School of Architecture; History and Theory of Architecture
This dissertation explores how architecture was mobilized within postwar circuits of anticolonial and transnational exchange to articulate a language of solidarity and liberation.

Nicolas Verdejo
“Architectural Education Under the Iron Fist: Architecture Schools during the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile, 1973–1990”
Pennsylvania State University, Stuckeman School, Department of Architecture
Focusing on the Pinochet regime, this dissertation examines the impact of its policies on architecture schools in Chile.

 

2024 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Sarah Saad Alajmi
“Between Nomadism and Settlement: The Architectural Transformation of the Arabian Desert, 1940s–1970s”
University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design
This dissertation researches the modernization and sedentarization of the tribespeople of Arabia in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which changed the desert architecturally and environmentally in the mid-twentieth century.

B. Jack Hanly
“The Environmental Professionals: Architecture, Regulation, and the American Landscape”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning; History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art
Looking at the rise of the environmental movement, this dissertation considers a corresponding transformation of architectural practice in the image of “environmental professionalism,” which sought to mediate disputes between public activists and private developers via ecological design techniques.

 

The 2025 grants to individuals inquiry form is due September 15, 2024

The Graham Foundation is currently accepting applications from individuals and collaboratives for the 2025 grant cycle. As one of the few funders of individuals in the field of architecture, the Foundation's grants provide important support for individuals to conduct research, and produce exhibitions, publications, and other projects that engage ideas across contemporary architecture discourse. Through this annual open call—a two-stage application process—the Graham Foundation offers two types of grants to individuals: Research and Production & Presentation grants.

The first stage inquiry form for 2025 is available online and is due September 15, 2024. For more information about the Foundation's grantmaking programs and eligibility requirements, click here.

Julia Phillips, “‘Pentasomnia’ storyboard for ‘Institution’ video,” 2024. Digital drawing. Courtesy the artist. From the 2024 grant to Julia Phillips for “Pentasomnia” 

The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the award of $519,500 for 56 new grants to individuals. Selected from nearly 600 submissions made at the Foundation’s annual application deadline in September 2023, the funded projects include publications, research, exhibitions, films, site-specific installations, and digital initiatives that expand contemporary ideas of architecture through innovative rigorous interdisciplinary work on design and the built environment. The funded projects are led by 84 individuals that include established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, and writers, based in cities such as Beijing, China; Bogotá, Colombia; Cairo, Egypt; Delhi, India; Houston, TX; Kampala, Uganda; London, United Kingdom; Los Angeles, CA; Melbourne, Australia; New York, NY; Paris, France; Washington, DC; and Chicago, IL, where the Graham Foundation is based.

The 2024 grantees join a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that the Graham Foundation has supported over the past 68 years. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than 44 million dollars in direct support to over 5,100 projects by individuals and organizations around the world. The 2024 grants to organizations will be announced later this summer.

The complete list of the 2024 individual grantees follows. Learn more about each project by clicking the links below.

EXHIBITIONS

Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles, CA)
A Non-Coincidental Mirror

Germane Barnes (Miami, FL)
Columnar Disorder

Gustavo Caboco, Brunno Douat, Ana María Durán Calisto, Manuela Omari Ima, and Romelia Angelica Papue Mayancha (Brasília, Brazil; New Haven, CT; New York, NY; Shell Mera, Ecuador; Tepapade, Ecuador)
Dien Dien: To Feel the Other and Weave a Territory

Dream The Combine: Tom Carruthers and Jennifer Newsom (Ithaca, NY)
Pyramidion

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Mengfan Wang, and Chen Zhan (Beijing, China and London, United Kingdom)
Ripple Ripple Rippling

Assaf Evron (Chicago, IL)
Collage for the Edith Farnsworth House

Dahlia Nduom (Washington, DC)
Tourism, Tropicalization and the Architectural Image

Albert Pope and Brittany Utting (Houston, TX)
The Sixth Sphere

Juana Salcedo (Austin, TX)
Jaguar Lens

Lobna Sana (Be’er-Sheva City, Israel)
Recognized

Craig L. Wilkins (Detroit, MI)
if history were told as stories it'd never be forgotten...

FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA PROJECTS

Mark Bennett, Geronimo Inutiq, and Rafico Ruiz (Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, Canada)
Ikiaqqijjut [Travelling through Layers]: A Field Guide to Infrastructural Literacy and Northern Connection

Molly M Brandt and Kevin Weil (Chicago, IL and New York, NY)
Inventory of a Building’s Reuse and a Landscape’s Redesign

Samira Daneshvar and Adam Longebach (Cambridge, MA)
Shahr-e Ghesseh [City of Tales]

Mariam Ghani (New York, NY)
An Incident

Jess Myers (New York and Syracuse, NY)
Here There Be Dragons, Season Four: Odes[s]a

Julia Phillips (Berlin, Germany and Chicago, IL)
Pentasomni

Fred Schmidt-Arenales (New York, NY)
IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT

Elizabeth M. Webb (Atlanta, GA)
Artificial Horizon

PUBLICATIONS

Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat (Haifa, Israel)
A Territory in Conflict: Eras of Development and Urban Architecture in Gaza

Menna Agha and Sara Salem (London, United Kingdom and Ottawa, Canada)
Disembodied Territories

Caitlin Blanchfield, Nina Kolowratnik, and Ophelia Rivas (Ali Jegk, Tohono O'odham Nation; Ithaca, NY; and Vienna, Austria)
Significant Impact: Contesting Surveillance Infrastructure on Indigenous Lands

Simon Boudvin (Paris, France)
Commune, Communism, Commons: A Walk Through Ivry-sur-Seine

Civil Architecture: Hamed Bukhamseen and Ali Ismail Karimi (Kuwait City, Kuwait and Muharraq, Bahrain)
Two Thousand Years of Non-Urban History

Aaron Cayer (Los Angeles, CA)
From A to AECOM: Architecture Practice at the Twilight of Professional Tradition

Michelle JaJa Chang (Boston, MA)
Also Known As

Beatriz Colomina with Nick Axel and Guillermo S. Arsuaga (New York, NY; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; London, United Kingdom)
Sick Architecture

Eva Díaz (New York, NY)
After Spaceship Earth

Every Ocean Hughes (New York, NY)
Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side

Suzanne Lettieri and Anya Sirota (Ithaca, NY and Ann Arbor, MI)
Junior Architects

Neil Levine (Cambridge, MA)
Architecture for Reading in Public: Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

Jeremy Lybarger (Chicago, IL)
Midnight Tremor: The Life and Art of Roger Brown

Anežka Minaříková (New York, NY)
Clara Istlerová, A Life Among Letters

Elizabeth J. Petcu (Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation

Ari Seligmann (Melbourne, Australia)
The Photographic Construction of Japanese Architecture

Angelika Stepken (Berlin, Germany)
Life after Architecture: The Writings of Gian Piero Frassinelli (Superstudio) 1966–2022

Stefaan Vervoort (Ghent, Belgium)
Marcel Broodthaers—The Architect is Absent

Ines Weizman (London, United Kingdom)
Joséphine Baker and the Colonial Modern

Amber N. Wiley (Philadelphia, PA)
Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation's Capital

Sara Zewde (New York, NY)
Finding Frederick Law Olmsted in Cotton’s Kingdom

RESEARCH PROJECTS

Verda Alexander and Maya Bird-Murphy (San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL)
Envisioning New Futures through Alternative Practice

Pedro Aparicio-Llorente (Bogotá, Colombia)
Payao: Trans-Pacific Sardine House

Lori A. Brown and Karen Burns (Syracuse, NY and Melbourne, Australia)
Women Architects and Global Solidarity Across the Cold War Divide: The International Union of Women Architects, 1963–1993

Alice Bucknell (Los Angeles, CA)
Staring at the Sun

Alice Buoli, Popi Iacovou, and Socrates Stratis (Milan, Italy and Nicosia, Cyprus)
Everyday Commoning: Living Diaries for Nicosia's Transnational Spaces

Arthur J. Clement and Emily G. Makaš (Atlanta, GA and Charlotte, NC)
Philip G. Freelon: An Architect of Relationships and Stories

Yasmine El Rashidi (Cairo, Egypt)
Monograph: Ali Labib Gabr and the Decolonization of Architecture

Christine Gaspar and Liz Ogbu (New York, NY and Oakland, CA)
Engaging Grief and Healing in Design

Annie Howard (Chicago, IL)
From Diva’s to the Pyramid

Elise Misao Hunchuck (Berlin, Germany)
An Incomplete Atlas of Stones

Yakin Kinger (Nashik, India)
Contesting Cultural Territory: Rereading Colonial Transformations of India’s Baghs

Sydney Rose Maubert (Miami, FL)
Queen of the Swamp: The Saltwater Railroad

Shivangi Mariam Raj (Delhi, India and Paris, France)
Shadow Thresholds: Architectures of Ruin in India

Hylozoic/Desires: Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (Delhi, India and London, United Kingdom)
The Hedge of Halomancy

Anthony K. Wako (Kampala, Uganda)
Tracing the Footprints of Entangled Narratives

James Wines, Suzan Wines, and Phillip Denny (New York, NY)
What Else Could It Mean? Writings and Drawings by James Wines, 1972–2022

 

The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce artist Cally Spooner as a 2024 Graham Foundation Fellow. As a part of the fellowship, Spooner will present a large-scale exhibition at the Foundation's Madlener House galleries featuring a repertoire of works from Deadtime, a multi-year research project started in 2018.

Deadtime stages an anatomy study of how performance quantifies the social body. In Deadtime, living and mediated bodies, not always human, appear and reoccur, both vital and corpse-like. At the Graham Foundation, the installation unfolds across media, spills through the Foundation’s architecture, and throws open the frame to ask: how does the present neoliberal condition deaden the social fabric, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead? Deadtime is formed from twenty works, including sound works and sonic scenographies, films, commissioned paintings, sculptural propositions, and anatomical-architectural interventions.

Opening to the public on February 17, 2024, Deadtime begins with “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering”— featuring performances, choreographies, conversations, and lectures by Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Hendrik Folkerts, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Maggie Segale, and Cally Spooner, among others.

At the Graham, Deadtime is cocurated by Graham Foundation director, Sarah Herda and Hendrik Folkerts, curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Registration is required for “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering”, click here to learn more.

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her live performances been staged at, amongst others, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012. Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works between London and Turin.

ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP

Synthesizing the Foundation’s grantmaking and exhibition programs, the program acknowledges the investment and resources required to produce an exhibition and invites an artist to create new work that engages the mission of the Graham Foundation—to explore ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Providing space, support, and financial resources for the production of new work, the Fellowship enables the Fellow to experiment with production techniques and, often, to create work at a new scale. The Fellowship culminates with an exhibition at the Foundation’s Madlener House galleries in Chicago.

The Fellowship program extends the legacy of the Foundation’s first awards, made in 1957, and continues the tradition of support to individuals to explore innovative perspectives on spatial practices in design culture. These initial fellowships provided a diverse group of practitioners a platform to pursue innovative ideas in the field, and they included alumni such as experimental architect Frederick J. Kiesler, painter Wilfredo Lam, Pritzker Prize winning architects Balkrishna V. Doshi and Fumihiko Maki, designer Harry Bertoia, photographer Harry M. Callahan, and sculptor Eduardo Chillida, among others.

Artist David Hartt piloted the contemporary Fellow program with his new body of work in the forest, which premiered at the Graham in the fall of 2017. Later Fellows include Katherine Simóne Reynolds (2023), Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (2022–23), Anna Martine Whitehead (2020–21), Sergio Prego (2020), Tatiana Bilbao (2019–20), Nelly Agassi (2019), Martine Syms (2018–19), Torkwase Dyson (2018), and Brendan Fernandes (2018).

 

CURRENT EXHIBITION
CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal
Curated by Floating Museum 
Through January 27, 2024

GALLERY AND BOOKSHOP HOURS
Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.
Free admission, no reservations required

CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal at the Graham features work by: 
Cecil McDonald, Jr.
Dream The Combine
interim studio (Nora Akawi and Eduardo Rega Calvo) with Jumanah Abbas; Salim al-Kadi, Khaled Malas, Alfred Tarazi, and Jana Traboulsi (Sigil Collective); Taesha Aurora; Jeankarlos Cruz; Muna Dajani; Nadine Fattaleh; Martina Duque Gonzalez; Haitham Haddad (Studio Mnjnk); Aamer Ibraheem; Mapping Memories of Resistance project (Birzeit University, London School of Economics, Al-Marsad Arab Center for Human Rights in the Golan); Emad Madah; Rami Nakhle; Daniel Ruiz; Frederick Rapp; and Holly Nicole Smithberger
Larissa Fassler

Curated by the interdisciplinary arts collective the Floating Museum, CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal features the work of more than 80 local and global participants in exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago Architecture Center, Graham Foundation, the James R. Thompson Center, and other sites across the city.

For more information on the exhibition, CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal, click here.

The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the 2023 Carter Manny Awards for doctoral dissertations and research by emerging scholars. Through this annual program the Graham supports work that contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The winner of the 2023 Carter Manny Writing Award is Aaron Tobey and the winner of the 2023 Carter Manny Research Award is Jia Weng. Both are history and theory of architecture doctoral candidates at Yale University School of Architecture. These projects, along with eight citations of special recognition, were selected by an external panel of scholars.

Tobey’s dissertation, “Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design,” details how computer aided design software and practices common today were coconstructed with transformations in the internal organization and international geography of architectural production at several large American architectural firms around information management and the design of design processes from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s.

Weng’s dissertation, “Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape,” investigates the evolution of heating and cooling conduits in China through three episodes in the twentieth century and examines how information-controlled material flows gave rise to a global airscape that generated thermal inequalities between kinetic elites and migrant workers through architecture.

The Carter Manny Award program—named for architect Carter H. Manny (1918–2017) in recognition of his contributions to the Graham Foundation, as founding trustee in 1956, director from 1971–93, and as director emeritus—has granted 45 awards and 139 citations representing over $1 million in support of this important student work since its establishment in 1996.

The 2023 Carter Many Awards panel included: Eva Díaz (Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, Pratt); Ginger Nolan (Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, University of Southern California); and Adedoyin Teriba (Assistant Professor of Art History, Dartmouth).

Below is the full list of the 2023 Carter Manny Award winners and citations of special recognition. Learn more about the history of the award and browse a selection of past winners on the Foundation’s website.

2023 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD

Aaron Tobey

Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design
Yale University, School of Architecture

2023 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD



Jia Weng
Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape
Yale University, School of Architecture

2023 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

An Tairan
The Incidental Artifactuality of the Observational Sciences in Italy, c. 1840–1880
Princeton University, School of Architecture
This project investigates the erratic media byproducts and unintended artifactual consequences both triggered and revealed by a group of research institutions established for the scientific observation of nature in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Italy.

Deepthi Bathala
Famine crops, Plantations, and Environmental Imaginaries: Botanical gardens in colonial and contemporary India
University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
The genealogy of the earliest colonial botanical gardens in India illustrates a contingent colonial project of improvement, that of constructing regional climate imaginaries corresponding to ephemeral agricultural landscapes, contested, mediated and negotiated by human and non-human actors.

Michael Moynihan
Aggregative Expertise: A Global History of Housing, Information Science, and the Deprofessionalization of the Architect, 1973–82
Cornell University, Department of Architecture
This dissertation focuses on three projects funded by national governments (Mexico, Argentina, and Spain) to demonstrate that in the 1970s, expertise related to housing shifted from professional architects to aggregate experts working in entrepreneurial/consultancy groups, governmental research institutions, and international development aid agencies.

Chelsea Spencer
The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, 1870–1930
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture + Planning
At once a media history of the construction industry and a shadow history of modern architecture, this dissertation traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Sylvia Wu
Mosques on the Edge: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China
University of Chicago, Department of Art History
The dissertation is a close study of the Qingjing Mosque complex in Quanzhou, China, whose medieval and contemporary sections have distinct histories but are made to conform to a coherent historical narrative that subsequently allows the site's newly constructed architectural profile to eclipse that of its premodern past.

2022 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Angelika Joseph
Red Power Takeover: Native American Activists, Colonial Landscapes, and the Design of Sovereignty
Princeton University, Humanities Council and School of Architecture
This dissertation examines the strategies by which Red Power Movement activists designed social, cultural, and political transformations, weaponizing landscapes shaped by their oppressors against the state and creating new worlds within old architectural forms.

Adam Longenbach
Stagecraft / Warcraft: The Rise of the Military Mock Village in the American West, 1942–1953
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
This dissertation investigates the mid-twentieth century rise of the military "mock village," experimental sites where novel ways of seeing and constructing architecture coincided with the production of new forms of violence and destruction.

Qiran Shang
“It’s Only Dancing…”: Urban Spaces, Pleasure, and Resistance in Berlin, San Francisco, and Shanghai, 1924–1989
University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design
Analyzing how people have historically made spaces of popular dance into sites of resistance, this dissertation illuminates gay and lesbian dance venues in 1920s Berlin, countercultural landscapes of dance in 1960s San Francisco, and students’ spontaneous dance parties and queer ballrooms in 1980s Shanghai by studying rare films and photographs, memoirs, oral testimonies, as well as maps and building plans.

UPCOMING GRANT DEADLINES
2024 Grants to Individuals: application due September 15, 2023
2024 Carter Manny Award: application available September 15; due November 15, 2023
2024 Grants to Organizations: application available January 15, 2024; due February 25, 2024

Images: [1] Screen photograph of the interface of DRAW3D displaying a three-dimensional wireframe model of Chicago's "loop" district compiled using several other graphic and non-graphic programs created at SOM for DEC mainframe computers and Tektronix Graphics Terminals by the beginning of the 1980s, 1980, Chicago. Courtesy SOM / Copyright SOM
[2] Thomas T. K. Zung and Shoji Sadao, China International Trade Center, Tianjin or Beijing, China, 1986–89. From Thomas T. K. Zung, ed., "Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the Millennium," (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). Courtesy Thomas T. K. Zung

2024 grants to individuals inquiry form, due September 15, 2023

Supporting individuals is at the core of the Graham Foundation’s mission to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The original grantmaking program of the Foundation was designed to provide direct support to individuals.

Since its founding in 1956, the Graham Foundation has awarded over 5,000 grants—with over 2,800 grants awarded to individuals, representing an investment of more than 20 million USD. Such support has gone to emerging and established architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, scholars, writers, and other individuals working in the field of architecture.

As one of the few funders of individuals in the field of architecture, the Foundation's grants provide important support for individuals to conduct research, and produce exhibitions, publications, and other projects that engage ideas across contemporary architecture discourse. Through its annual open call—a two-stage application process—the Graham Foundation offers two types of grants to individuals: Research and Production + Presentation grants.

The first stage inquiry form for 2024 is now available online and is due September 15, 2023. For more information about the Graham Foundation grantmaking programs and eligibility requirements—and to explore hundreds of funded projects from the last decade—visit grahamfoundation.org.

Upcoming grant application deadlines
2024 grants to individuals: inquiry form available, due September 15, 2023
2024 Carter Manny award: application available September 15, due November 15, 2023
2024 grants to organizations: inquiry form available January 13, 2024, due February 25, 2024

Image: Amaza Lee Meredith Scrapbook, Azurest South (Negative), n.d. Photograph, 4 x 6 in. Courtesy Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia. From the 2023 grant to Virginia Commonwealth University Foundation for the exhibition "Dear Mazie," 

The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce the award of 38 grants to organizations worldwide that support projects—including exhibitions, publications, and other public presentations—that foster the development and exchange of ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society, furthering the mission of the Graham Foundation. Collectively, these projects explore different issues, methods, and platforms of contemporary architecture discourse and feature work by architects, archivists, artists, curators, designers, educators, and other professionals working with organizations around the world in cities such as Beirut, Los Angeles, Richmond, Tijuana, and Chicago, where the Graham Foundation is based.

The new grantees join a global network of organizations and individuals that the Graham Foundation has supported since its founding in 1956. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than $43 million in direct support to over 5,000 projects by organizations and individuals. Learn more about each project by clicking the links below.

Learn more about each project by clicking the links below to explore a dedicated project page here.

EXHIBITIONS

ArchiteXX (Syracuse, NY)
Spatializing Reproductive Justice

Art Omi (Ghent, NY)
Olalekan Jeyifous: Even in Arcadia...

Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago)
CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal, 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Chicago Architecture Center (Chicago)
OUR CHANGING DOWNTOWN: International Residency with ChartierDalix, Paris

Citygroup (New York)
Citygroup Exhibition Program, 2023

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York)
Home: Smithsonian Design Triennial

Del Vaz Projects (Los Angeles, CA)
Alma Allen & Su Wu: Site Repair

Dia Art Foundation (New York)
Cameron Rowland at Dia Beacon

Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL)
A Love Supreme

Landmark Columbus Foundation (Columbus, IN)
Public by Design, 2023 Exhibit Columbus

The Renaissance Society (Chicago)
Dala Nasser

SPACES (Cleveland, OH)
Everlasting Plastics, US Pavilion, 18th International Architecture Exhibition

University of Texas at Austin—School of Architecture (Austin, TX)
The Black Home as Public Art

Virginia Commonwealth University Foundation (Richmond, VA)
Dear Mazie,

FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA PROJECTS 

Architectural Association School of Architecture (London)
Entangled Archive: a digital framework for collecting and sharing the dispersed legacy of the AA Department of Tropical Architecture

The School of Architecture (Scottsdale, AZ)
Seabreeze Bop City

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Association of Architecture Organizations (Chicago)
2024 Design Matters Conference

Geoffrey Bawa Trust (Colombo, Sri Lanka)
On Gardens: Contemplating the Relative in Space, Time, and Life

Harvard University—Graduate School of Design, African American Student Union (Cambridge, MA)
The Black Home, Black in Design Conference 2023

SALAA (Tijuana, Mexico)
Rethinking Architecture Education in Latin America

The World Around (New York)
The World Around Summit 2024

PUBLICATIONS

a83 (New York)
Architectural Image-Making in 1980s New York: The John Nichols Printmakers & Publishers Collection

Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada)
AP205 Amancio Williams: Readings of the Archive by Studio Muoto, Claudia Shmidt, and Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Dark Matter U (Philadelphia, PA)
Challenging Patterns of Supremacy: Provocations from Collective Pedagogy, Practice, and Organizing

Dongola (Beirut, Lebanon)
Provoking the Territory: Bernard Khoury

i press (Boston, MA)
Revisiting the i press Series on the Human Environment by Mary Otis Stevens

LIGA—Space for Architecture (Mexico City)
The missing architect

Loudreaders (Ames, IA)
The LOUDREADER

New York Review of Architecture (New York)
Los Angeles Review of Architecture

Soberscove Press (Chicago)
In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett performance works

University of Illinois at Chicago—School of Architecture (Chicago)
The UIC/SoArch Journal

Victoria and Albert Museum (London)
Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa and South Asia

STUDENT-LED PUBLICATIONS 

Paprika! (New Haven, CT)
Paprika! Volume IX

Rice University—School of Architecture (Houston)
PLAT 13

Toronto Metropolitan University (Toronto, Canada)
SPACE FOR FREE

University of California, Berkeley—Architecture Department (Berkeley, CA)
Arkisnak

University of California, Los Angeles—Department of Architecture and Urban Design (Los Angeles)
POOL, Issue No. 09

University of Southern California—School of Architecture (Los Angeles)
SPACE, Vol. 1: Delirium

Upcoming Grant Deadlines

2024 grants to individuals: inquiry form deadline: September 15, 2023
2024 Carter Manny award: application available: September 15, 2023; due November 15, 2023
2024 grants to organizations: application available January 15, 2024; due February 25, 2024