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Graham Foundation announces 2019 architectural research grants winners

And the winner is...

Graham Foundation announces 2019 architectural research grants winners

Jeffrey Hogrefe and Scott Ruff won a grant for their publication, In Search of African American Space. Pictured: Rodney Leon Architects, The Ark of Return (Rodney Leon Architects)

The Graham Foundation recently announced the winners of 63 grants for projects that ranged from exhibits on suburban housing stock to research on the effects of MTV on postmodern space. The Chicago-based foundation awarded more than $460,000 to awardees from around the world, selected from more than 500 proposals. In total, more than 4,500 projects have been funded by the Graham Foundation since 1956.

New domestic formations, the topography of epidemics, and an examination of architecture’s relationship to riots are among the projects awarded Graham funding. Below is a selection of the exhibits, publications, programs, and research projects that were among this year’s awardees, with text provided by the Graham Foundation.

Model of a suburban home with face peeking through a window
Kwong Von Glinow, Smuggling Architecture (Courtesy of the artists)

Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow 
for the exhibit Smuggling Architecture

“The history of the suburban house has been and continues to be codified in a handful of builder’s manuals that offer a huge selection of home plans to pick-and-choose buyers. These builder homes are living artifacts: a domestic typology rigidly embedded within the American landscape. Smuggling Architecture seeks to reclaim the suburban housing stock that has been neglected by modern architecture. The exhibition optimistically smuggles meaning and value into the interiors of generic suburban house plans through architectural orders.”

A blue-painted room with a white table in the center
The Extrapolation Factory, installation view of Alternative Unknowns: an exhibition of potential emergency (Courtesy of the artists)

The Extrapolation Factory, practice founded by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken for the public program Metro Test Zones

“Metro Test Zones, a new initiative from The Extrapolation Factory, proposes studying the way think-tanks work and distilling those approaches to make them accessible to communities and individuals. Providing tools for visualizing dreams from all sorts of cultural perspectives opens up new rhetorical spaces for questioning the world with greater potential for change.”

Satellite map of Mexico City with city and Lake Texcoco outlined
Frida Escobedo and Xavier Nueno, city limits of Mexico City and the outline of Lake Texcoco (Courtesy of the artists)

Frida Escobedo and Xavier Nueno
for the research project An Atlas of New Mexican Ruins

“If archeological ruins were rearranged during the postrevolutionary period in museums and historical sites to construct Mexico’s postcolonial identity, “designed ruins” have become the testimony of the undoing of the Mexican nation-state under the close supervision of transnational institutions and corporations… An Atlas of New Mexican Ruins aims, through a series of visual and theoretical case studies, to explore the destructive—although productive—architectural work of neoliberalism in Mexico.”

Axionometric rendering of a youth space for Interim Urbanism by N H D M
N H D M (Nahyun Hwang & David Eugin Moon), Interim Urbanism 9 (Mi Sueño Nuyorquino) (N H D M Architects)

Nahyun Hwang & David Eugin Moon
for the exhibit: Interim Urbanism: Youth, Dwelling, City

“Youths represent a dynamic yet precarious section of today’s populations. No longer belonging to safe spaces of childhood, but not yet, if ever, integrated into the expected paradigms of traditional family structures, a large portion of today’s youths, while seemingly spontaneous in lifestyle choices and welcoming mobility, occupy the vulnerable spaces of the in-between and the prolonged interim. The project investigates the spaces that youths reside in, as they intersect with sustained sociopolitical and economic uncertainties, inequalities, and emergent lifestyles.”

Axionometric diagram of a building showing its energy systems
Energy Task Force, Sol & Equity drawing from Self-Help Housing and the Cities (Courtesy of UHAB)

Nandini Bagchee and Marlisa Wise
for the exhibit: Homesteading and Cooperative Housing Movements in NYC, 1970s and 80s

“The exhibition Homesteading and Cooperative Housing Movements in NYC, 1970s and 80s, tracks the impact of collective, self-organized practices such as squatting, homesteading, and resident mutual aid in New York City and examines the way in which they have shaped the city. By analyzing ownership models, construction methods, spatial techniques, and material practices deployed by the cooperative housing movement, and presenting them through an immersive and interactive environment, the exhibition asks audience members to imagine new models for equitable development and spatial commoning.”

The top of a house peeking out of a hillside, a work by Heather Hart at Storm King
Heather Hart, The Oracle of Lacuna (Courtesy of the artist)

Heather Hart 
for the research project Afrotecture (Re)Collection

“This work is unearthing, interpreting, and constructing architectures for liminal spaces that emerge from the intersection of notable African American narratives, architectural form, and theory. What might happen if the balcony of the infamous Lorraine Hotel—the Memphis, TN, establishment where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968—was replicated in a gallery space?

Students protesting as two men debate each other
Cesare Colombo, Giancarlo de Carlo debates with Gianemilio Simonetti as protesting students take over the Milan Triennale (Courtesy of Cesare Colombo)

Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister
for the publication Radical Pedagogies

“Radical Pedagogies is a collaborative history project that explores a series of pedagogical experiments that played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. As a challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the postwar field of architecture. They are radical in the literal meaning stemming from the Latin radix (root), as they question the basis of architecture. These new modes of teaching shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. They operated as small endeavors, sometimes on the fringes of institutions, but had long-lasting impact.”

An assembled sculpture of painted corrugated metal on table legs in the desert
Noah Purifoy’s Homage to Frank Gehry (Sara R. Harris)

Sara R. Harris and Jesse Lerner 
for the film These Fragmentations Only Mean …

“In the late 1980s, the artist Noah Purifoy retired from his position of many years on the California Arts Council and moved from Sacramento to a remote desert site just north of Joshua Tree National Park. There, over the last fifteen years of his life, he created a complex series of assemblage sculptures and precarious architectural constructions that sprawl over ten acres of the high desert land, administered by the Noah Purifoy Foundation. With the support of the Noah Purifoy Foundation, this remarkable site is at the center of this documentary project.”

The full list of grantees is below and at the Graham Foundation site.

EXHIBITIONS
Florencia Alvarez Pacheco, (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Petra Bachmaier, Sean Gallero, and Iker Gil (Chicago, IL)
Nandini Bagchee and Marlisa Wise (New York, NY)
Shumi Bose, Emma Letizia Jones, Guillaume Othenin-Girard, and Nemanja Zimonjić (London, United Kingdom and Zürich, Switzerland)
Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon (New York, NY)
Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow (Chicago, IL)
Sahra Motalebi (New York, NY)
Anna Neimark (Los Angeles, CA)

FILM/VIDEO/NEW MEDIA PROJECTS
Rodrigo Brum and Sama Waly (Cairo, Egypt)
Dani Gal (Berlin, Germany)
Sara R. Harris and Jesse Lerner (Los Angeles, CA)
Sean Lally (Lausanne, Switzerland)Lisa Malloy and J.P. Sniadecki (Evanston, IL and Redmond, WA)

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
The Extrapolation Factory: Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken (New York, NY)
Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago, IL)

PUBLICATIONS
Pep Avilés and Matthew Kennedy (Mexico City, Mexico and University Park, PA)
Andrea Bagnato and Anna Positano (Genoa, Italy and Milan, Italy)
Claire Bishop (New York, NY)
Anna Bokov (New York, NY)
Larry D. Busbea (Tucson, AZ)
Sara Jensen Carr (Boston, MA)
Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister (Munich, Germany; New York, NY; and Princeton, NJ)
Elisa Dainese and Aleksandar Staničić (Delft, the Netherlands and Halifax, Canada)
Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual, and Andrea Bagnato (Milan, Italy)
Natasha Ginwala, Gal Kirn, and Niloufar Tajeri (Berlin, Germany)
Vanessa Grossman, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, and Ciro Miguel (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Zurich, Switzerland)
Jeffrey Hogrefe and Scott Ruff (Baldwin, NY and Lancaster, PA)
Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon (Ithaca, NY and Boston, MA)
Beth Hughes and Adrian Lahoud (London, United Kingdom and Sydney, Australia)
Robert Hutchison (Seattle, WA)
Pamela Johnston (London, United Kingdom)
Seng Kuan (Cambridge, MA)
George Legrady (Santa Barbara, CA)
Zhongjie Lin (Philadelphia, PA)
Brian McGrath and Sereypagna Pen (New York, NY and Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
Lala Meredith-Vula (Leicester, United Kingdom)
Ginger Nolan (Los Angeles, CA)
Todd Reisz (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Erin Eckhold Sassin (Middlebury, VT)
Steve Seid (Richmond, CA)
Katherine Smith (Decatur, GA)
Susan Snodgrass (Chicago, IL)
Penny Sparke (London, United Kingdom)
Mark Wasiuta (New York, NY)
Folayemi (Fo) Wilson (Chicago, IL)

RESEARCH PROJECTS
Miquel Adrià (Mexico City, Mexico)
Joshua Barone, Phillip Denny, and Eléonore Schöffer (Cambridge, MA; New York, NY; and Paris, France)
Kadambari Baxi (New York, NY)
Gauri Bharat (Ahmedabad, India)
Santiago Borja (Mexico City, Mexico)
Michael Borowski (Blacksburg, VA)
Frida Escobedo and Xavier Nueno (Mexico City, Mexico)
Assaf Evron and Dan Handel (Chicago, IL and Haifa, Israel)
Beate Geissler, Orit Halpern, and Oliver Sann (Chicago, IL and Montréal, Canada)
Heather Hart (New York, NY)
Alison Hirsch (Pasadena, CA)
David J. Lewis, Paul Lewis, and Marc Tsurumaki (New York, NY)
Onnis Luque and Mariana Ordóñez (Mexico City, Mexico)
Jonathan Mekinda (Chicago, IL)
Giovanna Silva (Milan, Italy)
Léa-Catherine Szacka (Manchester, United Kingdom)
Jessica Vaughn (New York, NY)
Edward A. Vazquez (Middlebury, VT)

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