Carter Manny Award recipients look to pools and public health for research inspiration

Each year, the Graham Foundation’s coveted Carter Manny Awards honor the scholarship of doctoral candidates and their research projects which contribute new narratives to our contemporary understanding of architecture and its bearings on the arts, culture, and society. The Awards are bestowed in honor of late architect Carter H. Manny (1918–2017), who served as the director of the Graham Foundation between 1971 and 1993. 

For its 28th edition, Columbia University’s Y. L. Lucy Wang took home the Writing Award and was joined by Arièle Dionne-Krosnick of McGill University, the winner of the Carter Manny Research Award. 

This year, the award acknowledgment increased in each category: The Writing Award is now worth $25,000 and the Research Award is $20,000.

Wang, who completed her undergraduate studies at Northwestern University and is currently employed by COOKFOX in New York City, focused on the architectural implications of public health crises that gripped Hong Kong and the nascent Republic of China after 1894. Her dissertation sought to establish linkages between public consciousness, hygiene, and professionalized architecture. In it, she finds a bond between both professions that was forged of necessity and, in the end, "managed outbreaks, modernized architecture and infrastructure, and modulated between tradition and modernity."

Dionne-Krosnick is a former curatorial assistant in the department of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her research into the sociopolitical dogmas contained in contemporary architecture brought her to focus on swimming pools and their status as a flashpoint in the fight for Civil Rights in American cities in the 1960s. Anti-segregation protests stemming from these sites are therein considered a spark for broader changes to the built environment of the time. Dionne-Krosnick completed her BFA in art history and studio arts at Concordia University in Montreal and holds an MA in visual and critical studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Foundation also recognized six scholars with Citations of Special Recognition:

• Sarah Saad Alajmi of the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design for Between Nomadism and Settlement: The Architectural Transformation of the Arabian Desert, 1940s–1970s
• B. Jack Hanly of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning for The Environmental Professionals: Architecture, Regulation, and the American Landscape
• Yara Saqfalhait of Columbia GSAPP for Building at a Distance: Architecture, Contractual Techniques, and Economies of Trust in the Late Ottoman Empire 1876–1930
• Ecem Saricayir of Cornell AAP for Property in Migration: The Making and Unmaking of the South Caucasus, 1878–1955
• Shivani Shedde of Princeton SoA for Projections of Possibility: Architectural Imaginaries of Afro-Asian Solidarity 1947–1977
• Nicolas Verdejo of the Penn State Stuckeman School of Architecture for Architectural Education Under the Iron Fist. Architecture Schools during the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile, 1973–1990

The deadline to apply for next year's Carter Manny Award cycle is November 15th, 2024.