From airports to beaches and river basins to hydroelectric dams, sand is a humble material that plays a vital role in the built environment and human communities. Underpinning modern cities and modern life, sand is a key component of concrete, glass, paved roads, and man-made terrain. However, by dredging submarine systems and channels, sand mining erodes river banks and disturbs ecosystems. Colossal amounts of sand are dug up and moved to shape one habitat while destroying another.
Investigating how sand is mined and used at these diverse sites, Cheng will conduct interviews with key stakeholders and investigate design decisions, procurement routes, contractual relationships, financing, regulations, and policies. She also plans to develop educational and public programs and a multimedia archive that will be open-access and available to affected communities, activist groups, and associated researchers.
“The proposal of Tracing Sand is the convergence of my different lines of work so far, the teachings that made me an architect, and the life experiences that made me. I see architectural materiality as an active, tangible force driving and shaping long chains of consequences and dependencies. It draws surprising connections between sites, communities, and ecologies. Winning the Wheelwright Prize affirms that the questions I’m after are part of the larger quest of architecture today, at a time of intensified social injustice and ecological crisis.
As a travel-based design research award, the Wheelwright cannot be more fitting for this rather audacious proposition: to follow sand is to trace architectural materiality through supply chains and ecosystems. It is to learn through embodied experiences the entangled flows of people, life forms, matter, and the built environment across scales. Understanding how interconnected and interdependent we all are is fundamental today. I believe architecture provides a material wayfinding through this almost incomprehensible entanglement—and offers possibilities to transform it.
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng.
Film still from Orchid, Bee, and I, co-directed by Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng.
Single-channel video exhibited as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics, at ZKM. Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, 2020-22. The research is co-led by Elise Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng.
In his book The World in a Grain (2018), American-Canadian journalist Vince Beiser underscores why sand affects each and every one of us:
"It is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live.’ Cyan Cheng’s Wheelwright proposal takes Beiser’s claim one step further: sand underpins our built environment, but also our global economy,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “Tracing together material evidence, technological expertise, labor practices, and corporate reach, Cheng’s study has breadth that makes it relevant to every community across the globe, and specificity that promises to reveal hitherto unknown repercussions of this fragile resource.”
Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture.
Jurors for the 2023 prize include: NOURA AL SAYEH, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; MIRA HENRY, design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture; MARK LEE, Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; JACOB RIEDEL, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; ENRIQUE WALKER, Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD; and SARAH M. WHITING, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.
“Tracing Sand examines an increasingly ubiquitous material that is at the base of the production of land and architecture by following its sourcing and consumption, unveiling the increasing entanglement of matter and site, as well as the livelihoods affected by its extraction. By dissecting the complexity of material supply chains and the complicity of architecture in the destruction of natural environments, Cyan’s research bridges opposing sites and actors, from extraction to consumption, local communities to stakeholders. Through a multi-media approach and an in-depth analysis of the guts of hypermodernity, the proposal aims towards a comprehensive shift in the value system of architecture.”
Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities.
The Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries. Winning research proposal topics in recent years have included the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge and material futures; how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora; and new architecture paradigms for storing data that can reimagine digital infrastructure.
Cheng was among four distinguished finalists selected from a highly competitive and international pool of applicants. The 2023 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists ISABEL ABASCAL, MAYA BIRD-MURPHY, and DK OSSEO-ASARE for their promising research proposals and presentations. Jingru (Cyan) Cheng follows 2022 Wheelwright Prize winner Marina Otero, whose Wheelwright project, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, is currently in its travel-research phase.
