Harvard GSD announces 2018 Richard Rogers Fellows

Harvard GSD has finally revealed the six 2018 Richard Rogers Fellows. First launched in October 2016 by the school, the yearly fellowship is inspired by the architectural topics central to Richard Rogers' life and career. Open to professionals and scholars working in any design-related field, the unique fellowship includes a three-month residency at the iconic Richard Rogers-designed Wimbledon House in London, access to the city's cultural institutions and academic resources, and a $10,000 stipend. The fellows will reside in London in pairs during the spring, summer, and fall.

Fellows must propose new or ongoing research that would benefit from a residency in London. The fellowship intends to “encourage in-depth investigation into a wide array of issues that are pertinent to the sustainable and equitable development and transformation of the city”.

Here's more about how the 2018 fellows will use the residency:

SPRING FELLOWS

Irina Davidovici (Zurich, Switzerland)

Davidovici will use her residency to conduct a comparative study of London co-housing schemes and Zurich housing cooperatives, viewed through the common criteria of citizen participation, self-governance, sustainability, and social inclusion. The topic is developed from an architectural perspective, focusing on the impact of communal living and participative processes on the design of innovative prototypes for collective housing.

Peter Buš (Zurich, Switzerland)

Peter will investigate potentialities of computation, digital fabrication methods, and prototyping practices for their applications of construction deliveries in large-scale urban contexts and their capacities to respond to citizens’ necessities. Within this scope, the research aims to reveal, examine, and define to what extent the return of workshop models through digital making is capable to deal with large quantities of bespoke productions, considering the current advancements in a building industry and fabrication technologies as well as a position of citizens in on-site participation.

SUMMER FELLOWS

Aleksandr Bierig (Cambridge, US)

Bierig will be advancing his dissertation research, exploring the architectural, infrastructural, and commercial regulations of the eighteenth-century coal trade, including documentation on coal taxation, records of debates on the London Coal Trade, and designs for metropolitan improvements. This work will take place at several archives and institutions, including the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives, and the British Museum.

Alexis Kalagas (Zurich, Switzerland)

During the fellowship, Kalagas intends to explore how alternative models of affordable housing could be adapted and scaled in places like London that are reckoning with this acute challenge. In particular, Kalagas is interested in whether non-speculative, rental-based developments could succeed in cities shaped by a persistent dream of homeownership, and take root in an overheated property market.

FALL FELLOWS

Kaz Yoneda (MArch '11; Tokyo, Japan) 

Yoneda’s research will focus on the design protocols of mega-scale developments, and “Tokyoism,” which he calls a projective manifesto for a city without one. His fellowship research takes a topical and critical look at the 2012 London Olympics, in comparison to Tokyo’s forthcoming 2020 Olympics, to conduct analyses of its transparent process, innovation, and design evaluation. It is the greater ambition of this project to imagine what Tokyo could have become if its enabling system endowed much of what should have been learned from London.

Cathy Smith (Newcastle, Australia)

Smith’s interdisciplinary research will develop an ethical and theoretical framework for engaging with the emergent phenomenon of London “property guardianship,” a term used to describe the sanctioned, temporary occupation of vacant commercial and residential buildings in Europe, North America and Australia. This research will focus on the stakeholder experiences of the London “model” of property guardianship by situating them in a broader international and critical scholarly context.

Find out more on richardrogersfellowship.org.