Graham Foundation Grants 2021: architecture

Graham Foundation 2021 Grants, Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts USA, Individuals

Graham Foundation Grants 2021

Funding for individuals and organizations in the Fine Arts, USA

post updated June 2, 2021

Graham Foundation Announces 2021 Grants to Individuals

$585,000 awarded to individuals exploring innovative design ideas that expand contemporary understanding of architecture in the context of this transformative year

Graham Foundation 2021 News

The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce the award of 71 new grants to individuals worldwide that support projects on architecture. Grantee projects represent diverse lines of inquiry engaging original ideas that advance our understanding of the designed environment. Selected from nearly 700 proposals, the funded projects include research, exhibitions, publications, films, digital initiatives, and other inventive formats that promote rigorous scholarship, stimulate experimentation, and foster critical discourse in architecture.

“This year, as the pandemic forced communities, cities, and countries to close down, the inequities of design and the built environment only intensified,” said Graham Foundation director Sarah Herda. “Through this dynamic grantee cohort, the Graham continues its 65-year commitment to supporting individuals to realize ideas that have the power to change the field of architecture.”

The individuals leading these projects are based in cities such as Ahmedabad, India; Milan, Italy; Mexico City, Mexico; Durban, South Africa; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Projects focus on locations such as Accra, Ghana; Caracas, Venezuela; Knoxville, TN; and Chicago, IL where the Graham Foundation is based. The innovative projects are led by eminent and emerging architects, artists, curators, filmmakers, historians, and photographers, among other professionals. The 2021 Grantees projects represent a broad range of disciplines:

  • Historian Shantel Blakely looks at the living legacy of under recognized Black architect Charles E. Fleming (b. 1937) and his prolific practice, concentrating on his work in the St. Louis, MO area
  • In the book Green Obsession, Milan-based architect Stefano Boeri and his studio sound a call to action to the field around climate change
  • Amaxiwa | Embodied Archives brings to life architectural histories at heritage sites across Africa, led by Russel Hlongwane and Sumayya Vally—who was included on the 2021 TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders
  • The exhibition deposition by artists Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter, transports and transforms the last pit floor from the Chicago Board of Trade to Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion for the 2021 São Paulo Biennial

The new grantees join a worldwide network of individuals and organizations that the Graham Foundation has supported over the past 65 years. In that time, the Foundation has awarded more than $41 million dollars in direct support to over 4,800 projects by individuals and organizations.

The complete list of the 2021 individual grantees follows. Please find descriptions of the awarded projects beginning on page 3. 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.

LIST OF 2021 INDIVIDUAL GRANTEES (71 awards)

EXHIBITIONS (12)

Juliana Rowen Barton, Michelle Millar Fisher, Zoë Greggs, Gabriella Nelson, and Amber Winick

Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter

Parsons & Charlesworth: Jessica Charlesworth and Tim Parsons

Stanley Cho, Elisa Iturbe, and Alican Taylan

Gabriel Cira and James Heard

Felecia Davis, Marcella Del Signore, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, and William D. Williams

Kevin Hernandez-Rosa, Nicholas Serrambana, Arien Wilkerson, and Marisa Williamson

Sean Lally

Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta

Vernelle A. A. Noel

Constance Owl

Kelly Walters

FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA (10)

Can Altay

Adil Dalbai and Livingstone Mukasa

Russel Hlongwane and Sumayya Vally

Brockett Horne, Briar Levit, and Louise Sandhaus

David Huber

John Lin

Sharon Lockhart

Jamila Moore Pewu

Regner Ramos and Kleanthis Kyriakou

Fred Scharmen

PUBLIC PROGRAMS (1)

Elisa Silva

PUBLICATIONS (24)

Noam Andrews

Pierre Bélanger and Pablo Escudero

Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Mark El-khatib, and Bushra Mohamed

Stefano Boeri Architetti: Stefano Boeri, Fiamma Invernizzi, Maria Lucrezia de Marco, Simone Marchetti, Sofia Paoli, Maria Chiara Pastore, Luis Pimentel, and Livia Shamir

Susan Buck-Morss, Kevin McCaughey, and Adam Michaels

Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira

Anthony Carfello

Katherine L. Carroll

Peter H. Christensen

Patricio del Real

Gareth Doherty

Giulia Foscari

Pedro Gadanho

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani, Joris Kritis, and Jelena Pancevac

Vanessa Grossman

Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal

Tim Johnson

Steffen Kunkel

Paulo Moreira

Adriana Salazar

David Schalliol

Mindy Seu

Pier Paolo Tamburelli

Marc Treib

RESEARCH PROJECTS (24)

Anahi Alviso-Marino and Neïl Beloufa

Adjoa Armah

Shantel Blakely

Jerald “Coop” Cooper

Felicia Francine Dean

Farhana Ferdous

Gabriel Fuentes

Meredith J. Gaglio

James Graham

Sara Jacobs

Ishita Jain and Ankita Trivedi

Theodore S. Jojola and Lynn Paxson

Ladi’Sasha Jones

Elizabeth M. Keslacy

Wanda Katja Liebermann

Thandi Loewenson

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Joe Namy

Enrique Ramirez

  1. F. Tierney

Nick Tobier

Amanda Russhell Wallace

Charisse Pearlina Weston

Kiyan Williams

DESCRIPTIONS OF AWARDED PROJECTS—2021 GRANTS TO INDIVIDUALS

EXHIBITIONS (12 awards)

Juliana Rowen Barton, Michelle Millar Fisher, Zoë Greggs, Gabriella Nelson, and Amber Winick Croton on Hudson, NY; Edgartown, MA; Philadelphia, PA; and Providence, RI

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births
Center for Architecture and Design, Philadelphia, PA

A first-of-its-kind exploration—realized through several partnerships across the Philadelphia area—of the arc of human reproduction through the lens of architecture and design.

Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter
Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Ann Arbor, MI
deposition

34th Bienal de São Paulo, Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo, Brazil
Deposing violent power dynamics that shape global space, this exhibition relocates an obsolete seven-tier commodity trading pit floor from the grain room of the Chicago Board of Trade to the center of Oscar Niemeyer’s Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion for the 2021 São Paulo Biennial.

Parsons & Charlesworth: Jessica Charlesworth and Tim Parsons
Chicago, IL
Catalog for the Post-Human

17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy

Presenting a satirical collection of sculptural works and animations that provoke conversations about the impact of surveillance and human enhancement technologies upon an increasingly contingent workforce, this iteration of the installation by the same name is presented at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Stanley Cho, Elisa Iturbe, and Alican Taylan
New York, NY
Confronting Carbon Form

Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union, New York, NY
This exhibition looks at the climate crisis through the lens of space and form—artifacts from the scale of the city to that of household objects are considered in relation to the energy paradigm that has given them form to shed light on the spatial and cultural foundations that confront architecture’s central role in the formation of carbon modernity.

Gabriel Cira and James Heard
Cambridge and Somerville, MA
The Architects Collaborative 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship

pinkcomma gallery, Boston, MA
An exhibition and accompanying digital wiki tool that documents, maps, and contextualizes the vast output of The Architects Collaborative—a Massachusetts firm founded by Walter Gropius and seven other equal partners—that normalized postwar American vernacular modernism for mass society and, over the course of its 50-year history, mainstreamed the corporate model of architectural practice.

Felecia Davis, Marcella Del Signore, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, and William D. Williams
Cincinnati, OH; Houston, TX; New York, NY; and University Park, PA
Hair Salon: Translating Black Hair Practices for Architecture Using Computational Methods

University of Houston College of Architecture and Design, Houston, TX
This exhibition looks to natural Black hair texture and maintenance practices to generate novel building materials and architectural structures using computational design processes in an exploration of Blackness as an intellectual and aesthetic force in American cultural and built landscapes.

Kevin Hernandez-Rosa, Nicholas Serrambana, Arien Wilkerson, and Marisa Williamson
New Haven, CT; Philadelphia, PA; and South Orange, NJ
Vault

Keney Park Sustainability Project, Windsor, CT
An interdisciplinary and collaborative space-making project that transforms a shuttered public school in the North End of Hartford, CT into an outdoor exhibition space through dance, performance, and monumental public art.

Sean Lally
Lausanne, Switzerland
Shaped Touches

17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy

This full-scale installation at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale takes the form of a multi-player video game platform to explore the relationships between architecture, people, and communities, to illustrate opportunities and implications for urban public space.

Farzin Lotfi-Jam and Mark Wasiuta
New York, NY
The Machine at the Heart of Man: Doxiadis’ Informational Modernism

Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece
A study of the Doxiadis Associates Computer Center in Greece, its role in the formation of Doxiadis’ informational modernism, and its importance for the consolidation of the tools and techniques that have evolved into our era’s computational urbanism.

Vernelle A. A. Noel
Gainesville, FL
Design and Making in the Trinidad Carnival: Histories, Re-imaginations, and Speculations of Computational Design Futures
University Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

Showcasing previously unseen photographs of making practices and dancing sculptures in the Trinidad Carnival between the 1940s and 1960s, as well as new, reimagined, physical and digital artifacts, drawings, and architecture based on the traditional carnival craft of wire-bending, this exhibition illustrates how computing can remediate and reconfigure dying crafts for new design pedagogy, practices, and architecture.

Constance Owl
Palo Alto, CA

ᎠᏂᎩᏚᏩᎩ / Anigaduwagi / People of Creator’s Land

David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, Stanford, CA

Mountain Heritage Center, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
Through an indigenous reading of historic maps and settlement patterns, the exhibition explores Cherokee strategies of placemaking and how notions of sacred stewardship, belonging, community, and language have been used in the creation and reclamation of Cherokee spaces.

Kelly Walters
New York, NY

With a Cast of Colored Stars

Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York, NY
This exhibition examines visual representations of Black identity found in the print design of African American cinema, television, and music.

FILM, VIDEO, AND NEW MEDIA (10 awards)

Can Altay
Istanbul, Turkey
Ahali Conversations with Can Altay: A Podcast on the Future of Cultural Production and its Spaces (Season 3)

A podcast series that investigates current and critical matters regarding cultural production, focusing on how cultural practice and institutions position themselves, form communities, and generate spaces—especially with respect to contemporary art, design, and architecture in the twenty-first century.

Adil Dalbai and Livingstone Mukasa
Berlin, Germany and Rensselaer, NY
Africa Architecture Network
This project establishes an online community of practice—composed of researchers and architects who are passionate about architecture in Africa—building from the more than 300 authors who collaborated to develop the first comprehensive architectural guide to sub-Saharan architecture, aiming to increase visibility to the continent’s built environment and enable exchange among practitioners, scholars, and others.

Russel Hlongwane and Sumayya Vally
Durban and Pretoria, South Africa
Amaxiwa | Embodied Archives
Working from the idea that sites of memory are sites of imagination, this project takes the form of a set of speculative histories and archaeologies on sites in Benin; Senegal; Accra, Ghana; and Zimbabwe, to counter otherwise erased, silenced, or invisible architectural histories and imaginaries.

Brockett Horne, Briar Levit, and Louise Sandhaus
Baltimore, MD; Ojai, CA; and Portland, OR
The People’s Graphic Design Archive
A crowd-sourced virtual archive of graphic design history built by everyone, about everyone, for everyone.

David Huber
Urbana, IL
Entangled: Shorelines
An open-access educational podcast series that explores historical and contemporary entanglements between design, environment, technology, infrastructure, and urbanism by focusing on distinct conceptualizations of the shoreline across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

John Lin

Hong Kong

Renovation Toolbox : A guided tour of innovative houses by self-builders in rural China

The project develops a series of films corresponding to four vernacular housing typologies, bringing into critical focus the adaptation of traditional houses in rural China.

Sharon Lockhart
Los Angeles, CA
Baumettes
Led by the voices of female inmates in Baumettes prison in Marseille, France, this film, named for the prison, is a meditation on the effects of carceral architecture and isolation, and how a diverse group of individuals cope and find agency behind prison walls.

Jamila Moore Pewu
Fullerton, CA
Art of the Matter
This project documents, preserves, and critically engages the spatial narratives and public art practices that emerged during the 2020 protest for Black lives and racial justice by capturing both artworks and streetscapes in a crowdsourced, deep mapping application and discovery platform.

Regner Ramos and Kleanthis Kyriakou
London, United Kingdom and San Juan, Puerto Rico
Coloso: A Factory of Queer, Digital Monuments for Puerto Rico
A web-based, virtual factory that produces digital monuments commemorating closed LGBTQ+ spaces and buildings in Puerto Rico, thus inserting them in the island’s architectural history, its cultural infrastructure, urban memory, and political future.

Fred Scharmen
Baltimore, MD
How to Make and Un-Make a World; an Incomplete Catalog of Questions and Answers
Italian Virtual Pavilion, 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy

Produced as part of City X by curators Tom Kovac and Alessandro Melis, and creative director Ed Keller for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, this piece—equal parts text manifesto and animated object lesson—distills knowns and unknowns about world-making as a practice.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS (1 award)

Elisa Silva
Caracas, Venezuela
Nothing Out of the Ordinary: a space for the arts, celebration, acknowledgement and sancocho in the barrio La Palomera

Based in Caracas, Venezuela, this program engages the community to collaborate on renovating an abandoned structure, using art, culture, and events to guide the transformation.

PUBLICATIONS (24 awards)

Noam Andrews
Ghent, Belgium
The Polyhedrists: Art and Geometry in the Long Sixteenth Century

(MIT Press)
Told through the transformation of the Platonic solids in the hands of late Renaissance artisans and architects, this book offers a material history of the development of geometry in the early modern period.

Pierre Bélanger and Pablo Escudero
Cambridge, MA and Quito, Ecuador
The Quino Treaty: Renewing Territorial Relations with the Cinchona Plant at the Center of the World by Decolonizing Quinine and the Global Discourse on Conservation

(ORO Editions)
This book charts the 497-year global, urban, history of the cinchona plant from South America, whose bark offers a key contribution to contemporary civilization as it contains the only known cure for malaria: the drug quinine.

Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Mark El-khatib, and Bushra Mohamed
London, United Kingdom
The Course of Empire: A Compound House Typology

(Register Research Group)
A book documenting the development of the Ghanaian compound house, from traditional types—such as Kumasi Shrine House—to modern iterations found in urban centers.

Stefano Boeri Architetti: Stefano Boeri, Fiamma Invernizzi, Maria Lucrezia de Marco, Simone Marchetti, Sofia Paoli, Maria Chiara Pastore, Luis Pimentel, and Livia Shamir
Milan, Italy
Green Obsession

(Actar Publishers)
This publication on the work of architect Stefano Boeri and his studio, Stefano Boeri Architetti, puts forth an urgent call to action to the field to fundamentally address climate change through design.

Susan Buck-Morss, Kevin McCaughey, and Adam Michaels
Ithaca and Ridgewood, NY; Los Angeles, CA

Architectures of Thought: Imagining Philosophy / Not Philosophizing Images

(Inventory Press)
By studying and enacting the principles of montage, this project offers a means of thinking through how images and ideas work in today’s hyper-visual landscape.

Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira
London, United Kingdom
CERFI: Militant Analysis, Institutional Programming and Collective Equipment

(Het Nieuwe Instituut)
The first publication on the legacy of the collective CERFI in France (1967–85) and its experimental work on the institutional programming of collective equipment.

Anthony Carfello
Los Angeles, CA
La città capitalista (The Capitalist City)

(Skira Editore)
Italian architect Giovanni Brino’s little-known 1978 survey of Los Angeles architecture, advertising, and lifestyle, published for the first time in English.

Katherine L. Carroll
Delmar, NY
Building Schools, Making Doctors: Architecture and the Modern American Physician

(University of Pittsburgh Press)
A timely investigation of early twentieth-century American medical schools, this book argues that medical educators, donors—namely John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board—and architects—including Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge—called on architecture to define science; promote modern medicine; and institutionalize professional identities, which intersected with constructions of race and gender.

Peter H. Christensen
Rochester, NY
Materialized: German Steel in Global Ecology

(Penn State University Press)
Linking architectural history and critical ecological studies, this new study provides a touchstone in a material-centered approach to the history of architecture.

Patricio del Real
Cambridge, MA
Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art

(Yale University Press)
Through examination of select architecture exhibitions in the first half of the twentieth century, this book presents how The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design constructed an image of the world to manage the American Century.

Gareth Doherty
Cambridge, MA
Landscape Fieldwork

(University of Virginia Press)
This book provides insights for understanding and designing landscapes based on experiential knowledge gained from landscape fieldwork.

Giulia Foscari
Hamburg, Germany
Antarctic Resolution

(Lars Müller Publishers)

A transnational and cross-disciplinary project that presents critical research on Antarctic geopolitics, science, and architecture, conceived to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the first sighting of the continent in 2020.

Pedro Gadanho
Lisbon, Portugal
Climax Change! Architecture’s Paradigm Shift After the Ecological Crisis

(Actar Publishers)
An overview of how climate change and the current environmental emergency affects the practice of architecture—in terms of direct impact on design philosophy and on the opportunities to transform the course of the discipline’s aesthetic, ethical, and professional principles.

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani, Joris Kritis, and Jelena Pancevac
Brussels, Belgium; Paris, France; and Trieste, Italy
The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi

(Buchhandlung Walther König)
A collection of projects by Aldo Rossi from the 1960s and 1970s that suggests that each project reflects the broader context of the architecture of the city itself.

Vanessa Grossman
Delft, the Netherlands
A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France

(Yale University Press)
An examination of the remarkable flurry of architectural activity that resulted when the French Communist Party (PCF)—one of the foremost Western communist parties of the twentieth century—became a patron for the designs, discourses, and organizational efforts of a distinguished circle of French modern architects, which found their most fertile terrain in the banlieue, the formerly industrial peripheries of France’s major cities.

Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal
Brookline, MA and New York, NY
What is Ours: Art and Architecture Towards Mutualism

(Columbia University Press)
An anthology of conversations with leading thinkers, designers, entrepreneurs, and activists whose perspectives on collectivism and mutualism engender communal self-determination, wealth, and well-being.

Tim Johnson
Marfa, TX
Al Rio/To the River

(Hatje Cantz)

Conceived and edited by the poet Tim Johnson, this collaborative publication comprises two artists’ books—a photographic volume featuring recent works by the artist Zoe Leonard; and a reader with contributions by artists, journalists, poets and historians, including C.J. Alvarez, Ariella Azoulay, Cecilia Ballí, Remijio “Primo” Carrasco, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Natalie Diaz, Dolores Dorantes, Darby English, Álvaro Enrigue, Catherine Facerias, Josh T. Franco, Esther Gabara, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Elisabeth Lebovici, Jose Rabasa, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Cameron Rowland, and Roberto Tejada.

Steffen Kunkel
Wiesthal, Germany
Gottfried Böhm and the Pilgrimage Church Mary, Queen of Peace

(Spector Books)
Based on several years of research, this richly illustrated book is the first in-depth study of the pilgrimage district of Mary, Queen of Peace—by German Pritzker Prize Laureate Gottfried Böhm—and features a plethora of previously unpublished drawings, photos, models and archival material as well as in-depth interviews with Böhm and project-related architects and collaborators.

Paulo Moreira
Porto, Portugal
Critical Neighborhoods: The Architecture of Contested Communities

(Park Books)
This book explores informal architecture and urbanism, analyzing recent actions in Africa, Asia, and the United States with contributions by Matthew Barac, Julia King, Elisa Silva, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Ines Weizman.

Adriana Salazar
Mexico City, Mexico
Water Spells

(Pitzilein Books)
This project gathers a diverse range of voices which reveal the entangled relations between humans, water, and the built environment within the context of Mexico City today.

David Schalliol
Minneapolis, MN
Social Landscapes

(MAS Context)
Drawing from two decades of globe-spanning photographic projects, this book articulates a visual sociological perspective on the relationship between people and place—from how inequality manifests in the vernacular architecture of the Midwestern United States, to how social and environmental changes interplay to radically reshape Japan’s Tōhoku coast.

Mindy Seu
New York, NY
Cyberfeminism Catalog

(Inventory Press)
This sourcebook of radical techno-critical activism from 1990–2020 gathers hackers, scholars, artists, and activists that reimagine the history of the internet and guide its future.

Pier Paolo Tamburelli
Milan, Italy
On Bramante: Forty-three Theses

(MIT Press)
A book on contemporary architecture comprised of 43 theses on the work of Italian architect Donato Bramante (1444–1514).

Marc Treib
Berkeley, CA
The Aesthetics of Contemporary Planting Design

(ORO Editions)
An international survey of the understudied subject of planting design aesthetics in contemporary landscape architecture.

RESEARCH (24 awards)

Anahi Alviso-Marino and Neïl Beloufa
Paris, France
Monument Stories: Cities of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula through Monument Biographies
This project establishes an interactive website, featuring a multimedia map of the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf cities, that charts monuments from the 1970s until present day that were designed to embellish public space and commemorate events and political figures.

Adjoa Armah
Cape Coast, Ghana and London, United Kingdom
In our language the word for the sea means “the spirit that returns”
An illumination of the cartographies of African spiritual life, geographic articulations, and spatial consciousnesses through the forts that dot the Ghanaian coast.

Shantel Blakely
St. Louis, MO
Charles E. Fleming, Architect
Photographic documentation of the built architectural works of Charles E. Fleming, focusing on projects in the St. Louis area—including houses, schools, dormitories, health clinics, and several park and recreation areas, including a velodrome.

Jerald “Coop” Cooper
Cincinnati, OH
Architectures of Abolition
Using the Underground Railroad networks of Ohio as an anchor for contemporary conversations in defense of Black lives, this exhibition delves into the events, people, and places of the mid-nineteenth century escape routes to situate the built environment as a matter of life and death.

Felicia Francine Dean
Knoxville, TN

Perception of Misconceptions: Intersecting Stone and Fabric Material Identities
A study of the transference of biracial identity, and the intrinsic methods of self-discovery, to the intersections of stone and fabric’s architectural material identities—at a furniture scale—based on the vernacular of Gramollazzo, Italy and Knoxville, TN.

Farhana Ferdous

Washington, DC
The (pathogenic)-CITY: A Segregated Landscape of Urbanization, Urbanicity, and Wellbeing in American Landscape (the 1900s to present)

A chronological history of racial disparities in American landscape that argues how urbanization and planning movements have transformed minority health and well-being from post-industrial society to the present.

Gabriel Fuentes

Union, NJ
White Gold / Black Energy: Architecture, Sugar, and Oil During Revolutionary Cuba’s Gray Period

The study of Cuban revolutionary architecture and its entanglement with colonial histories of slavery and global histories of energy during the Gray Period—during which Cuba strengthened geopolitical and ideological ties with the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Meredith J. Gaglio

Baton Rouge, LA
Life Arks: Science, Spirituality, and Survival in the Work of the New Alchemy Institute
This project considers the ways in which members of the 1970s experimental collective, the New Alchemy Institute, integrated scientific innovation, mysticism, and left-libertarian values into their sustainable bioshelter designs.

James Graham
Alameda, CA
The Household Modernism of Paulette Bernège
Research on the French journalist and activist Paulette Bernège (1896–1973), whose writings offer a vision of architectural modernism centered on women’s work.

Sara Jacobs

Vancouver, Canada

Landscapes of Racial Formation: Warren Manning in Atlanta, Georgia and Birmingham, Alabama

This research examines how landscape architect Warren Manning’s white supremacist atlas A National Plan (1919) reified racial formation in Birmingham and Atlanta through city plans implemented by Manning for those cities in 1919 and 1922, respectively—illuminating how racialized spatial logics are enacted through the making of urban space.

Ishita Jain and Ankita Trivedi

Ahmedabad and Sonipat, India
Sites of Indie-Futurisms: Traditional Board Games of India
Work towards an illustrated scholarly monograph using speculative world-building to catalogue traditional Indian board games as enmeshed ecologies of sites of production, sites of participation, and sites of generation of multiple Indie-futurisms.

Theodore S. Jojola and Lynn Paxson

Albuquerque, NM and Ames, IA
Contemporary Indigenous Architecture–The Pueblo Worldview
Expansion of the discussion and scholarship of what is ordinarily seen as architecture stuck in prehistory, to the contemporary and transformational.

Ladi’Sasha Jones

New York, NY
Black Interior Spatial Thought
Both a text and sculptural system that proposes a geometric typology towards Black interior spatial conditions—the communal, private, and performative—and the everyday movements in sociocultural production.

Elizabeth M. Keslacy

Oxford, OH
Concrete Leisure: Design and Public Space in the Wake of Urban Renewal

An exploration of post-urban renewal landscapes of public leisure in the American Midwest, built under their cities’ first Black mayors, that examines the agency and limitations of architecture to combat the urban crises of late twentieth century American cities.

Wanda Katja Liebermann

Oakland Park, FL
Architecture’s Problem with Disability

The first scholarly monograph to critically analyze the complex relationship between architecture and disability rights in the United States across pedagogy, policy, and practice in order to understand the discipline’s narrow response to disabled access, and to explore creative alternatives.

Thandi Loewenson

London, United Kingdom
Lumumba in Space: African Space Programs and the Project of Liberation
Culminating in a series of performance lectures addressed to the United Nations’ Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, this project investigates the role of Space Programs in the struggles for liberation from colonialism in six African countries—from late 1950s to present day—towards developing an understanding of how these programs contribute to emancipated constructions of Black self, Black statecraft, and Black people in relation to Earth and its resources.

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Wellington, New Zealand
Veblen’s Chicago: The Urban Origins of the Leisure Class

Although acknowledged as influential, the Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) remains a spectral presence in the historiography of modern architecture—this research situates Veblen’s work in the urban and intellectual context in which it was written and investigates its value for architectural history and theory into the twentieth century.

Joe Namy

London, United Kingdom
Songs for a Set
Research exploring the extended archives of Arab American composer Halim El Dabh (1921–2017), also known as the godfather of African electronic music, and the impact of architecture on his oeuvre.

Enrique Ramirez

New York, NY
Lines of Least Resistance: Architecture, Aeronautics, and Other Airs of Modernity
A study of how architectural and aeronautical cultures in eighteenth and nineteenth century France relied on line-making and line-drawing to construct new, modernized ideas about air and the natural environment.

  1. F. Tierney
    Berkeley, CA
    Racializing Risk: The History of Ladera Housing Cooperative
    Ladera Housing Cooperative, a postwar interracial housing cooperative in Portola, California, provides a compelling look at 1940s housing policies, exposing cultural norms of race in state lending structures.

Nick Tobier

Ann Arbor, MI
Small(er) Building Types
An illustrated compendium of vernacular buildings—such as bodegas or gas stations—accompanied by interviews and writings that meditate on the typology and role of these buildings in daily life.

Amanda Russhell Wallace

New London, CT
The East Texas Oilfield as an Architecture of Memento Mori
This project proposes an alternative to the narrative of the early twentieth century Great Migration by conflating the open and expansive architectural structures of the East Texas oilfield and the often secluded, rural cemeteries as a point of departure for a multimedia installation.

Charisse Pearlina Weston

New York, NY
(Riot) Through: The Fold, The Shatter
Linking the use of glass as a material representation of power and simulated intimacy in architecture with the long history of anti-Black violence, surveillance, and policing—reified by the “Broken Window Theory”—and media representations of resistance to that violence, this project utilizes folded glass sculptures and concrete architectural forms to put pressure on anti-Black protocols and politics of movement, sight, and being seen.

Kiyan Williams

New York, NY
Unearthing: Toward a Black Feminist Ecology in Contemporary Earth Art
In this text, the creative practice of Kiyan Williams is connected to a tradition of practitioners who use soil as a material and metaphor to unearth decolonial histories and fugitive futures.

ABOUT THE GRAHAM FOUNDATION

Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations, and by producing exhibitions, events and publications.

The Graham Foundation was created by a bequest from Ernest R. Graham (1866–1936), a prominent Chicago architect and protégé of Daniel Burnham.

UPCOMING GRANT APPLICATION DEADLINES

2022 Grants to Individuals inquiry form deadline: September 15, 2021

Application available: July 15, 2021

2022 Carter Manny Award: November 15, 2021

Application available: September 15, 2021

Buildings funded by Graham Foundation Grants 2021

– Gottfried Böhm,
The Pilgrimage Church Mary Queen of Peace, 1963–72.
Gottfried Böhm, The Pilgrimage Church Mary Queen of Peace
photo : Steffen Kunkel, 2015
From the 2021 individual grant to Steffen Kunkel for Gottfried Böhm and the Pilgrimage Church Mary, Queen of Peace

– Elizabeth Suina (Cochiti) of Suina Design + Architecture (Formerly Garret Smith Ltd),
Valle Vista Elementary School, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Valle Vista Elementary School, Albuquerque, New Mexico
photo : Courtesy Suina Design + Architecture
From the 2021 individual grant to Theodore S. Jojola and Lynn Paxson for Contemporary Indigenous Architecture–The Pueblo Worldview

– David Schalliol,
Stateway Gardens (Chicago, Illinois, USA), 2007.
Stateway Gardens Chicago, Illinois, USA - basketball game players
photo : David Schalliol
From the 2021 individual grant to David Schalliol for Social Landscapes

Adriana Salazar,
View of River La Compañía, Chalco Valley, Mexico, 2019.
River La Compañía, Chalco Valley, Mexico
photo : Adriana Salazar
From the 2021 individual grant to Adriana Salazar for Water Spells

– Kaiser Permanente Hospital, Baby Drawer, ca. 1950s. (A nurse tending to a sleeping infant in a mobile bassinet at a Kaiser Permanente Hospital, California, 1950s.)
Kaiser Permanente Hospital Baby Drawer
photo Courtesy Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources
From the 2021 individual grant to Juliana Rowen Barton, Michelle Millar Fisher, Zoë Greggs, Gabriella Nelson, and Amber Winick for Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births

– Atelier Masōmī and Studio Chahar,
Hikma Religious and Secular Complex in Dandaji, Niger, 2018.
Hikma Religious and Secular Complex in Dandaji, Niger
photo Courtesy Atelier Masōmī. Photo: James Wang
From the 2021 individual grant to Adil Dalbai and Livingstone Mukasa for Africa Architecture Network

– John Lin,
The Seasonal House, 2019. ShangriLa, Yunnan, China.
John Lin, The Seasonal House, ShangriLa, Yunnan, China
photo : Rural Urban Framework
From the 2021 individual grant to John Lin for Renovation Toolbox: A guided tour of innovative houses by self-builders in rural China

– Archival Slides of Charles E. Fleming House, Town and Country, Missouri, USA:
Charles E. Fleming House, Town and Country, Missouri, USA
photograph Courtesy The Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. Photo: Eric P. Mumford
From the 2021 individual grant to Shantel Blakely for Charles E. Fleming, Architect

– Bushra Mohamed, Lobi House Plan, 2020. Digital drawing, 6.4 x 6.5 in.
Bushra Mohamed Lobi House Plan
photograph Courtesy Bushra Mohamed
From the 2021 individual grant to Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Mark El-khatib, and Bushra Mohamed for The Course of Empire: A Compound House Typology

– Thandi Loewenson, Studies of the Zambian Space Programme: A Taxonomy of Flight. The Flag, 2020. Graphite on paper.
Thandi Loewenson Studies of the Zambian Space Programme
photograph Courtesy the artist
From the 2021 individual grant to Thandi Loewenson for Lumumba in Space: African Space Programs and the Project of Liberation

Previously on e-architect:

Graham Foundation News

Graham Foundation announces Fellowship program

We are so pleased to share that the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has announced the organization’s new Graham Foundation Fellowship program

Graham Foundation Grants News

Graham Foundation Announces 2017 Grants

Kibera Hamlets School, Nairobi, Kenya
photo – helloeverything/SelgasCano, Kibera Hamlets School, 2016, Nairobi, Kenya. Courtesy of architects. From the 2017 organizational grant to New York Foundation for Architecture-Center for Architecture for “Scaffolding”

Graham Foundation Grants

Madlener House, 4 West Burton Place, Chicago, Illinois 60610, USA
Telephone: 312.787.4071 [email protected]

Graham Foundation

Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation
Design: Nomad Studio, landscape architecture
Madlener House, Graham Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, USA
September 15 – December 31, 2016
Every Building in Baghdad
photo – Rifat Chadirji, IRQ/315/186: Offices, Central Post, Telegraph and Telephone Administration, Baghdad, 1975. Photographic paste-ups, 8.27” × 11.69”. Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation
Exhibition at the Graham Foundation

Architecture of Independence: African Modernism
Jan 29 – Apr 9, 2016
Architecture of Independence: African Modernism
photograph © Iwan Baan
Graham Foundation Exhibition
This exhibition explores the legacy of modernist architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring commissioned photographs by Iwan Baan and Alexia Webster and archival material, “Architecture of Independence” imparts a new perspective on the intersection of architecture and nation-building in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia following independence.

Location: 4 W Burton Pl, Chicago, IL 60610, United States of America – Madlener House

Chicago Architecture

Chicago Architecture Design – chronological list

Chicago Buildings

Recent Chicago Buildings

Ryan Center for the Musical Arts in Chicago
Design: Goettsch Partners
Ryan Center for the Musical Arts
photo from architects

Aqua Tower Chicago Skyscraper
Design: Studio Gang Architects

860-880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments
Design: Krueck & Sexton, Architects

Illinois Architecture

American Architecture

American Architects

Chicago Architecture

Chicago Building Photographs

Chicago Office Buildings

Chicago Skyscrapers

Place is the Space – Unprecedented Collaboration with Museum Architect Brad Cloepfil
Design: Brad Cloepfil + Allied Works Architecture
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis – CAM Exhibition

American Museum Buildings

American Architecture Design – chronological list

Green Air, a kinetic living sculpture at Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, USA. Summer 2016
Green Air installation at Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis
photograph : Alise O’Brien Photography
Green Air, Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis

American Architecture

American Houses

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art – Extension, Kansas
Design: Steven Holl Architects
Nelson Atkins Museum of Art building

American Museum Architecture

Comments / photos for the Graham Foundation Grants 2021 page welcome