Yesterday, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago announced the recipients of more than $600,000 in grant funding to organizations spearheading projects that “advance our understanding of the designed environment,” according to the nonprofit. Winners were chosen from more than 200 submissions.
A selection of winning projects are shown below, and the full list can be found on the Graham Foundation website.
Project: Exhibition, “The Artistic and Eclectic Will Martin”
Grantee: Architectural Heritage Center, Portland, Ore.
Entrant Description: This original, comprehensive exhibition on Portland, Ore., architect Will Martin, designer of some of the city’s best-known modernist work, captures the full range of Martin’s creative and at times irreverent work as an architect, artist, writer, and imaginative thinker. The exhibition demonstrates the vibrant fusion between art and architecture as it played out in Martin’s built and unbuilt work, from his earliest projects in the late 1950s to his untimely death in 1985. Drawing on the AHC’s holdings and loans, the exhibition presents the breadth of Martin’s experimental work, in the form of sketches and renderings, writings, paintings, and sculpture, to show how Martin’s wide-ranging interests, from botany to local history to humor, found expression in his work, most notably the iconic Pioneer Courthouse Square. The exhibition is a close look at an architect whose bold work can be reassessed 30 years after his last built project within the local and national context of modernist and post-modernist architecture.
Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura, Renderings by AtmĂłsfera
Serpentine Pavilion 2018 Designed by Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura, Design Rendering, Interior View
Project: Exhibition, “Serpentine Pavilion 2018 by Frida Escobedo”
Grantee: Serpentine Pavilion
Entrant Description: The Serpentine Galleries’ annual Pavilion commission is the most ambitious architectural project of its type. Internationally recognized as a platform for exciting and radical architecture to be built quickly and shared widely, the program celebrates its nineteenth anniversary in 2018. The Pavilion sits outside the Gallery on the front lawn and is experienced by up to 300,000 people each summer, designed by an architect yet to have completed a building in the UK. This year the Serpentine are commissioning Architectural Review 2016 Emerging Architecture Winner, the Mexican architect Frida Escobedo. Her design references the nearby Prime Meridian. Three reflective water pools and light pervading walls border an internal multi-purpose parallelogram space, illuminated by changeable light, as the sun makes its journey across the sky and through the structure’s permeated surfaces.
Courtesy MIT Future Heritage Lab.
A cultural shelter/adobe interpretation of the Palmyra Arch of Triumph, Al Azraq Refugee Camp, Jordan, 2017
Project: Publication, 1002 Inventions: Art and Design in Al Azraq Refugee Camp (MIT SA+P Press, 2019)
Grantee: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Future Heritage Lab
Entrant Description: 1002 Inventions takes readers on a visit to the everyday-life in the Al Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan to discover hundreds of fascinating creations designed by displaced Syrians. The book documents a wide range of art and design projects, through a selection of photographs, paintings, and stories written by a group of 20 young authors from the camp. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of Al Azraq creations reveal the cultural, emotional, and architectural needs of refugees within a context of scarcity, war trauma, and struggle for a future. Refugee inventions demonstrate how art, architecture, and design inspire hope and underpin innovation in a humanitarian context. The book suggests a method for a culturally sensitive approach to humanitarian architecture informed by the resilience and creativity of displaced communities. The book aims to inform the competencies of humanitarian design from the perspective of the refugees themselves.
Courtesy the artists
PHAT (Nathaniel Belcher, Stephen Slaughter), Harlem Ghetto Fabulous, 2003.
Project: Exhibition, “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture”
Grantee: Center for Architecture, New York
Entrant Description: Hip-hop is a cultural movement established by the Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s. Over the last five decades, hip-hop’s primary means of expression—deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti—have become globally recognized creative practices in their own right, and each has significantly impacted the urban built environment. Hip-Hop Architecture produces spaces, buildings, and environments that embody the creative energy evident in these means of hip-hop expression. “Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture” exhibits the work of students, academics, and practitioners at the center of this emerging architectural revolution.
Courtesy Luxigon/Mir
Project: Exhibition, “From Me to We: Imagining the City of 2050”
Grantee: Chicago Architecture Center
Entrant Description: “From Me to We: Imagining the City of 2050” investigates the design of future cities at two scales: the major challenges and disruptive technologies shaping our urbanizing planet, as well as specific responses from Chicago architects that envision what future life in Chicago when these major disruptors take hold of our cityscape. A series of six forthcoming temporary exhibitions will then investigate individual topics of ecology, technology, energy, mobility, materiality, and livability.
Courtesy the artists
Xefirotarch, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Ivan Bernal (lead lesigner), William Virgil, Polina Alexeeva, Homayoun Zaryouni, Ben Cheng, JunjieGuo, Cunhao Li, Huijin Zheng, Ana Derby, Rususupuisto Competition, Los Angeles, 2015
Project: Exhibition, “The Pixilated I”
Grantee: Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles
Entrant Description: “The Pixilated I” invites innovative architects working today to unravel a contemporary problem: how the blurring of boundaries between the virtual and the real in the new digital paradigm is shifting the way we think, produce, and speculate. It is crucial to confront such complexities as how speculative work can modify reality. “The Pixilated I” aims to expand understanding of the practice and discipline of architecture through new work that investigates the consequences and conundrums of the pixilated image as a vehicle for the production of form. With muting imagery presented on hand-held devices within a gallery context that itself mutates throughout the course of the show, “The Pixilated I” exists as a radical alternative to the traditional architectural exhibition of the modern era, and as such, opens new possibilities of conversation.
Upcoming deadlines for the next round of Graham Foundation grant applications are: Grants to individuals (Sept. 15); Carter Manny Award (Nov. 15); and grants to organizations (Feb. 25, 2019).
