72 Projects received the Graham Foundation Awards 2017 Grants

“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,” explain the Graham Foundation.

Amereida Phalene Latin América (documenta 14, Athens, Greece & Kassel, Germany)
This two-fold installation, in both Athens and Kassel, features the work of participants from the Open City (Ciudad Abierta)—part commune, part pedagogical experiment, and part hands-on architectural laboratory on the Pacific Coast of Chile.

Designing the Computational Image/Imagining Computational Design (Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA)
An exhibition of original photographs, film, high-quality reproductions, and interactive software reconstructions examines the formative period of numerical control and computer-aided design technologies in research labs between 1949 and 1976, and traces its links to present architectural design languages.

54 Basel Street (Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel) Reactivating architectural ornament as source material for a sculptural environment, this exhibition explores the Israeli city of the 1970s as a lens for the various histories of modernism in the Middle East.

Attending Limits: The Constitution and Upkeep of the US–Mexico Border (Woodbury University Hollywood Outpost, Los Angeles, CA)
Through the presentation of original text, animation, photographs, scale models, and maps, the exhibition theoretically frames a thickening of the US–Mexico border from a single line to a geopolitical territory.

Call for Peace with Anna Halprin's Planetary Dance (57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy) Exploring the relationship between dance and the architecture of space, this community ritual dance calls for peace among peoples and with the environment by creating a moving designed pattern.

Indigenous Outsiders: Endangered Islamic Heritage in the Republic of Georgia (Academy Hall Gallery, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts)
This project showcases the currently undocumented and at-risk architectural heritage of Georgia's minority Muslim Laz community, and in so doing, explores the role of historic preservation in national memory, while further establishing a foundation for future conservation efforts.

Victoria Square Project (documenta 14, Athens, Greece & Kassel, Germany)
On the occasion of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, this platform will engage existing community-based organizations, immigrant, and refugee initiatives, businesses, and local artists to explore how creative neighborhood activities can contribute to and develop sustainable community building.

Detritus and Development (Gandhara Art Space, Karachi, Pakistan)
An ongoing research project that continues to examine emerging landscapes at the intersection of infrastructure, war, and climate change in Pakistan today.

Geomancy, Modernity, and Memory: Unofficial and Unrecognized Historic Civic Centers in Ghana
A multi-media art installation which examines how historic patterns of space and culture continue to inform architecture and urban social life in Ghana, presenting a range of historic references, ranging from Pan-Africanism through anti-colonial activity and the period of the Transatlantic slave trade.

Incense, Sweaters, and Ice (Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY)
A new feature film inspired by the idea that anything one does while being watched is a performance follows three protagonists (shot on location in Los Angeles, California, St. Louis, Missouri, and Clarksdale, Mississippi) as they navigate the dramas of surveillance, moving between looking, being looked at, and remaining unseen.

Havana Modern: Nicolás Quintana and the Architecture of the City
A full-length feature documentary film centered on the architect Nicolás Quintana (1925–2011), who played an important role in the establishment of the Modern Movement in Cuba, and the city of Havana in particular.

Never Discuss Politics at Home
This project creates an architectural television show to debate the passivity of the discipline and challenges architecture to get involved in the central conflicts of the global agenda through the construction of alternative social and territorial narratives.

Absentee's House
This film traces a legion of houses that are empty or face uncertain destinies in Metztitlan, Mexico where the architecture of the uninhabited remittance house depicts a metaphor of how the notion of "house" becomes fragmented through the experience of migration, hegemonic lifestyle representations, and the transnational exchange of capital.

The Unstable Object (Part III)
A multimedia project that continues to explore the physical, social, and technical spaces of factory workers—whose lives touch us every day through the objects they create, despite the fact their daily routines remain invisible and largely unknown to us.

Night White Skies
A conversation-based podcast that features designers, engineers, and writers on the periphery of the architectural discipline discussing architecture's future, in which both the earth's and the body's environments are now open for  design.

Renderlands
This project is a documentary set in the outsourced video game studios and render farms of India, which follows a group of local animators through the office environments where they work, the digital landscapes they produce, and the cities where they live.

Everywhere All the Time
Connecting the fields of dance, music, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary performance includes choreography by Seán Curran, musical direction by David Skidmore of Third Coast Percussion, and set design by the renowned landscape architect Diana Balmori.

Water and the City
The ongoing research project African Water Cities, initiated by Kunlé Adeyemi in 2011, will continue to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by African cities and communities in or along water, including research and documentation conducted by Adeyemi's practice, NLÉ, and Suzanne Lettieri.

Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship, and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA 1984/87 (Birkhäuser)
This book offers a theory of open architecture by exploring Berlin-Kreuzberg's urban renewal through IBA1984/87, the International Building Exposition Berlin, as a microcosm of the history of public housing; the participatory, postmodern and poststructuralist debates in architecture; and the relation between cities, immigration and human rights, by giving voice not only to architects and policy makers, but also to noncitizen residents.

Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions (Lars Müller Publishers)
This book brings together essays by a group of leading architectural historians who explore the relationship between the institutions of a post-war globalizing world, such as corporations, the United Nations, "big science," the Catholic Church, the US government, and the evolution of the distinctive architectural idiom of Marcel Breuer, a lynchpin figure in the generation of Bauhaus designers who emigrated to the US and transformed modern architecture.

Unfinished State (Archive Books)
This project is a codex of visual narratives and conversations to navigate post-conflict landscapes, affective geographies, speculative real estate, and speculative fictions between Berlin and Beirut.

The City Creative: The Rise of Placemaking in Urban America (University of Chicago Press) Drawing on more than six years of fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, this book explores the intellectual underpinnings and practical experiences of "placemaking" in the United States.

Race and Modern Architecture (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Seventeen groundbreaking essays consider the role of racial theory in architectural discourse, from the Enlightenment to the present.

Design for the Real World: 1970s Humanitarian Design Activism (MIT Press)
Using previously unexplored archival and visual sources, this monograph explores the origins and impact of grassroots 1960s and '70s design activism, and its appropriation by late Cold War–policy makers under the guise of a postcolonial humanitarian "design for development" agenda.

Carlo Scarpa (Yale University Press)
As the definitive monograph on the iconic designer Carlo Scarpa, this important new book provides a full historical context for his life and the full range of his production, including architecture, works in glass, and exhibition design.

The Architect and the Public: The Contribution of George Baird to Architecture (Artifice Books on Architecture)
This book will provide the first critical framework surrounding George Baird's contributions to architectural discourse, including recent scholarly influences of his work and interviews with key protagonists who have had exchanges with Baird, including Kenneth Frampton, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Eisenman.

"Shaped for Purpose": Gerald Summers and Makers of Simple Furniture, 1931–1940 (Oslo Editions)
The first comprehensive monograph to document the work of Gerald Summers (1899– 1968), Britain's foremost designer of modern furniture in the 1930s, this book illuminates the significance of his work, not only to the evolution of twentieth-century architecture and design, but also to the conception of the modern domestic interior.

The Miniature Boom: A History of American Architectural Models in the Twentieth Century (Park Books)
Retracing the history of the architectural model, this book considers the postwar miniature boom, uncovering how the model became a medium of equal standing for both the design and presentation of architectural projects.

Leonardo Finotti: A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture, Volume 2 (Lars Müller Publishers)
This is the second photography book in an ongoing trilogy presenting images of Finotti's photographic vision of undiscovered Latin American modern architecture, and offering   an important overview of the region across nine latitudes: Buenos Aires, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Quito, Medellin, Caracas, Guatemala City, and San Juan.

Giedion In Between (gta Verlag)
In this book, Geiser reassesses the work of Swiss art historian and architectural critic Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) through the lens of cultural transformation and processes of modernization, reconsidering his position and role in architectural discourse with a focus on his engagement in a transatlantic and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Geostories (Actar Publishers)
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.

Indo Pacific: An Instantaneous Region, Stories, Atlases, Cartographies, and Commons (Architecture at Rice/Park Books)
Taking the recently created Indo-Pacific region as its focus, this publication considers how this para-fictional place could be considered architecture's ideal site as the once imaginary space becomes increasingly real.

Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (HarperCollins Publishers)
Through analyses of buildings, landscapes, and cityscapes from the ancient world to the present, this project draws from recent research in cognition and neuroscience to explore how people actually experience the built world, demonstrating its profound and pervasive effects on cognition, well being, and the sense of identity.

Gustav Klutsis: How to Make a Revolutionary Object (Inventory Press)
Based on new archival and museological research, this book presents the first sustained interpretation of a major corpus of presentation drawings for para-architectural agitational structures designed by the Soviet artist Gustav Klutsis in the early 1920s, for the dissemination of revolutionary speech, printed matter, advertising, and moving-image media.

The Informal as a Project: Practices of Self-Help Housing in Peru, 1954–1986 (University of Pittsburgh Press)
This critical examination of aided self-help housing, or technical assistance to self- builders, focuses on three interrelated themes: the circumstances which made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences that prompted architects to consider self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond.

Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press)
A book-length critical history of one of the most persistent and politicized, yet subtle, transformations in U.S. material culture that considers the twentieth-century shift from design for the average user to design for a range of users, culminating in the movement toward Universal Design.

How to Make the Next City
A catalogue of over 100 spatial-social tactics for a new architecture, this book is a practical manual that responds to the present challenges to architecture's public relevance, by collecting examples from all over the world and at all scales, which can reconnect architecture with its role of serving society.

Superpowers of Ten (Artifice Books on Architecture)
This publication examines Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero (1977), made by the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, through a body of research that includes contested facts about the film and a new series of experiments that explore alternative ideas about politics embeded in the film's assemblage of architecture, science, and daily life.

Goodbye World!: Looking at the World After the Internet (Sternberg Press)
This book addresses the 360 degree sensorial shift in the ways that we see, feel, and engage with art and the urban landscape post 2000, and offers a toolkit to help craft a new vocabulary for seeing, beeing, and feeling in the 21st century.

Seeing Sori Yanagi (Phaidon)
Exploring Japanese designer Sori Yanagi's work and design philosophy, this project offers the first comprehensive study of the designer's legacy through a new examination of works, exhibitions, lectures, and essays along with relevant works from the Mingei movement, opening a larger dialogue regarding intercultural connections and diversions within a design philosophy that continues to be reinterpreted by contemporary artists and designers.

Mussolini Dux and Architect: Propaganda and the Urban Landscape of Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press)
This book addresses the ways in which Benito Mussolini deployed and exploited architecture and urban planning as political and anthropological tools aimed at the transformation of society at large.

Dialogues on Urbanization: Emerging Landscapes (Actar Publishers)
To take stock of recent advancements in landscape architectural research methods, design strategies, and representational modes, this book features eleven pairs of speculative and built projects, accompanied by interviews with their designers.

"African Building Types: An Architectural-Ethnographic Study" and Other Essays by Hermann Frobenius
Comprised of the first english translation and a critical introduction to the earliest major texts about African architecture written by a trained architect in Germany, this publication presents writings from the 1890s by Hermann Frobenius, the father of the renowned anthropologist of Africa, Leo Frobenius.

Imagining New Eurasia
Through analysis of historical and contemporary architecture and urbanism, this publication integrates the role of cities, networks, and territories in urban, regional, and continental structures in order to conceptualize Eurasia as one continent.

The Eternal Internet Brother/Sisterhood (Automatic Books)
This project documents an annual nomadic residency project, exposing a countercultural techno-utopian spirit forged with a contemporary anthropology, influenced by internet culture.

Question Project (Hatje Cantz)
This publication documents a series of public interventions developed through a critical participatory device by Mil M2, an architecture and art collective based in Chile, aimed at the collective generation and dissemination of debates in public spaces.

Anders Ruhwald: Unit 1: 3583 Dubois Street (Moran Bondaroff and Volume Gallery)
In late 2014, ceramicist Anders Ruhwald purchased a foreclosed building in Detroit with the intention of using the four apartments within to explore the transformational politics of fire; this publication documents the resulting exhibitions and artworks, culminating in the permanent art installation that stands today at 3583 Dubois Street.

Depositions: Cultura and the Counsel of Roberto Burle Marx (University of Texas Press) This book examines the public parks of the modernist landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx in parallel with eighteen environmental position pieces delivered during his 1967– 74 appointment as cultural counselor to the military dictatorship in Brazil, demonstrating a bold voice of caution against rapid development, resource exploitation, and ecological devastation.

Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin AmericanInformal Settlements (Actar Publishers)
Highlighting the civic and political changes that effective public space making has had on informal settlements of Latin American cities, this collection of 21 case studies analyzes selected built interventions that provide a base for replication in other communities and enrich current literature on informal settlement improvement.

Theater of War: The Pretend Villages of Iraq and Afghanistan (CDS Books)
A photography-based book project that engages with the structures and inhabitants of mock training villages created on U.S. military installations in North Carolina, Louisiana, California, and elsewhere.

Reassembling the Natural
This anthology convenes emerging and leading artists, scholars, scientists, activists, and theorists to reconsider the meaning, design, and future of natural history collections in the context of the sixth great planetary extinction, currently underway on Earth as a result of habitat loss, urbanization, deforestation, and climate change.

Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press)
Examining the people, projects, and collaborations emerging from architecture and computational practices, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, this book includes the work of Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte, with the MIT Architecture Machine Group.

In the Forest Ruins (Verso Books)
The modern projects of colonization that were implemented in twentieth-century Amazonia are filtered through social and environmental histories to draw a critical archaeology of the global climate crisis in this book.

On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews (Soberscove Press)
Featuring the only existing first-person account of the Acropolis restoration project as told by the master marble sculptors who brought the project to fruition, this book consists of interviews and on-site photographs, which contrast discussion of technical aspects of their craft against the backdrop of the interviewees' experiences as workers and citizens living through the Greek economic and political crises.

Selling South Africa: Architecture, Tourism, and Identity in the Post-Apartheid Era
This project, which will culminate in a book manuscript, explores the role of tourist spaces in post-apartheid South Africa as unregulated sites of identity production that provide a counter-approach to more sanitized architectural modes of heritage-making such as museums, commemorative monuments, and public memorials.

Architectural Form Faces Urbanization: Manfredo Tafuri and the Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Center Competition
As part of a book on urbanization and architecture in the 1960s, this research project will provide an analysis of architectural form, scale, imageability, and public space through the lens of an overlooked essay by Manfredo Tafuri, "Critical Rationalism and New Utopianism, Competition for Restructuring Tel Aviv–Jaffa City Center."

The Transformation of Black Ypsilanti: Race and Housing in a Small American City
To examine the ways race and capital have shaped US housing policy in the twentieth century, this research will analyze the effects of segregated housing projects and urban renewal on the African-American Southside neighborhood in the small industrial city of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Terra Infecta
An ongoing research project that analyzes and charts the relationships between infectious diseases—malaria, AIDS, and other epidemics, among them—and the modern reorganization of cities and territories.

After Spaceship Earth
This writing-based research project explores critical responses to architect R. Buckminster Fuller’s call for new technologies and experimental architectures to populate outer space, analyzing the legacy of his ideas in contemporary art.

Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto
Half-manifesto and half-genealogy, this project explores the critical role that Narrative Architecture played in generating a twentieth-century critique of modernist ideology by understanding the potential of the methods and tools of representation as ends in themselves.

Archives of the “Oriental” Gaze: The Japanese Perception of Islamic Architecture in Global Perspective
Analyzing an untouched photographic collection, this project documents the Middle Eastern travels (1904–05) of Japanese architect and historian Ito Chuta (1867–1954), evaluating the impact of “Oriental” and “Islamic” architecture in the context of global cultural and geopolitical developments.

The Architecture and Infrastructure of South Louisiana The geographical complexities of South Louisiana, one of the frontlines of climate change in the United States, is examined in this project through a consideration of the region’s architectural history.

“Memories from Resistance”: Women, War, and the Forgotten Work of Margarete SchütteLihotzky, 1938–1989
Uncovering the work of forgotten architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, including her participation in the communist resistance against the Nazi regime and her activism in the Austrian women’s and peace movements, this interdisciplinary architectural history introduces her work to English-language audiences.

Vann Molyvann and the Absent Archives of Cambodian Modernism Architect
Vann Molyvann, an important cultural figure and protagonist in the history of Cambodian modernism, is the subject of this research project, which considers his work in relation to the fate of New Khmer modernist architecture during the military coup of 1970 and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The Architecture of Deafness: Two-Hundred Years of the Deaf School as an Architectural Type in the United States, 1817–2017
An historical recovery and design speculation on the overlooked architectural typology of the deaf school, this project considers how these schools tell a broader story of evolving attitudes towards deafness, disability, and normalcy through eras of welfare, assimilation, and empowerment.

Samuel Mockbee: Art and Architecture, Representation and Vision
This comprehensive study focuses on the life and practice of architect, artist and educator Samuel Mockbee and examines his belief in the significance of the creative act’s role in exposing truth and revealing beauty through an analysis of his drawings, paintings, sketches, and writings.

Concrete Spring: Oscar Niemeyer, Algeria, and the Architecture of Revolution
A pioneering exploration of Niemeyer’s extensive yet largely overlooked Algerian period, this project will form the basis of a long form essay in the AA Files journal, and subsequently a comprehensive monograph detailing this critical phase of the architect’s work.

Osage Orange: A Design Manual
This publication is the maiden issue of Prairie Studio, a series of natural history design manuals that engage the history and near future of keystone species and technologies of the Great Plains through essays, illustrations, and interviews.

The Organic Line and the Ends of Modernism
This book explores the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s concept of the “organic line,” a line of space that occurs between a painting and frame, or built elements such as lintels and doors, arguing for its importance in rethinking key terms and paradigms of art and architectural discourse, among them, medium, form, narrative, mark, image, environment, and edge.

Hitler’s Northern Dream: Building an Empire in Occupied Norway
Nazi building programs in Norway provide physical evidence of Adolf Hitler’s intended postwar empire, including new towns designed to enforce ideological conformity, vast infrastructures to move resources to Berlin, and carefully planned enclaves for the colonies’ German rulers.

A Nation of Walls
The often-overlooked history of segregation walls built throughout the United States in the mid to late 1930s to separate black and white neighborhoods are mapped in this forensic cartography research project.