Graham Foundation Grants 2021

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.