2017 RAMSA Prize awarded to Robert Cannavino and Mark Santrach

Robert Cannavino and Mark Santrach were announced today as the 2017 RAMSA Prize recipients. Separate from the $10,000 RAMSA Travel Fellowship, the firm's Partners grant the $5,000 RAMSA Prize to an employee(s), as an opportunity for the firm's staff to engage in their own in-depth research abroad that can meaningfully inform their design work. Cannavino and Santrach won with their proposal “‘Just’ Housing: Dutch Social Housing from 1915 to 1930”, and will travel to Amsterdam for two weeks.

Read on for more.

The winning proposal focuses on Amsterdam's early 20th-century social housing, which originated from the National Housing Act of 1902. “The Dutch created rich urban fabrics with just social housing,” Cannavino and Santrach wrote. “Despite lacking grand civic buildings and the benefit of incremental growth, the new neighborhoods espoused a clear hierarchy of forms, a rich network of public spaces, and a degree of picturesque monumentality.” During their trip, Cannavino and Santrach will attend a conference honoring 100 years of urban planning in Amsterdam. They also plan on adapting the topic of this trip into a presentation at CNU 26 in Savannah, Georgia in 2018.

The jurors — RAMSA Partners Gary L. Brewer, Meghan L. McDermott, and Paul L. Whalen — appreciated the proposal’s focus on both planning and building-design issues. They described it as “not only relatable to planning and building types that RAMSA is involved with, but a stylistic range of work that interests us deeply; and while many architects have travelled to the Netherlands, we have not seen a study like this presented internally—it’s a unique place that shouldn’t be overlooked.”

Last but not least, the jury congratulated the two runners-up of the competition:

Brenna Decker for “Tracing the Anatomy of a Capital City (Myanmar)
Natalia Klusek for “War + Architecture: The Story of the Built Environment as Edited by Conflict” (Jerusalem, Sarajevo, Moscow)