News SA+P community members win Graham grants
The Graham Foundation has announced over $560,000 in new grants to individuals around the world that engage original ideas in architecture. Five of this year's seventy-two funded projects were from members of the SA+P community including: Architecture's Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy; DUSP PhD candidate Suzanne Harris-Brandts; Caitlin Berrigan SMVisS ’09; Daniel Cardoso Llach SMArchS ’07, PhD ’12; and Nathan Friedman SMArchS ’15. These diverse projects advance new scholarship, fuel creative experimentation and critical dialogue, and expand opportunities for public engagement with architecture and its role in contemporary society.
Architecture's Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth, received a publication grant for Geostories with Actar Publishers in 2018. Geostories is a manifesto on the environmental imagination in the form of a series of architectural projects that deploy geographic aesthetics and narrative technique to engage the controversies and scales of the Earth as a grand question of design.
ACT alumna Caitlin Berrigan SMVisS ’09 received a grant for her artist's book project, Unfinished State, a codex of visual narratives and conversation to navigate post-conflict landscapes, affective geographies, speculative real estate, and speculative fictions between Berlin and Beirut. Unfinished State explores how unfulfilled optimism, flows of capital, and shifting social terrains manifest across time through architecture and prismatic landscapes. It will be published by Archive Books in 2017.
Attending Limits: The Constitution and Upkeep of the US–Mexico Border, an exhibition project by Architecture alumnus Nathan Friedman SMArchS ’15 theoretically frames a thickening of the US–Mexico border from a single line to a geopolitical territory through the presentation of original text, animation, photographs, scale models, and maps. The exhibition opens at the WUHO Gallery at Woodbury University in September.
Indigenous Outsiders: Endangered Islamic Heritage in the Republic of Georgia co-curated by DUSP PhD candidate Suzanne Harris-Brandts documents the architectural heritage of the minority Muslim Laz community in the Republic of Georgia, as a step toward preserving this vanishing cultural legacy. Indigenous Outsiders explores the role of historic preservation in national memory. The exhibition opens in September 2017 at Academy Hall Gallery, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.
Designing the Computational Image/Imagining Computational Design, an exhibition project by Architecture alumnus Daniel Cardoso Llach SMArchS ’07, PhD ’12 features original photographs, film, high-quality reproductions, and interactive software reconstructions examining the formative period of numerical control and computer-aided design technologies in research labs between 1949 and 1976, and tracing its links to present architectural design languages. The exhibition opens at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2017.