Belgian Architect Aude-Line Dulière Wins Harvard GSD’s 2018 Wheelwright Prize

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design has awarded its coveted $100,000 architectural research travel grant, the Wheelwright Prize, to Belgian architect Aude-Line Dulière. Established in 1935 and originally intended for Harvard GSD alumni, the fellowship has now become an open international competition supporting travel-based research and investigative approaches to contemporary design.

Dulière has won the 2018 Prize for her proposal Crafted Images: Material Flows, Techniques, and Uses in Set Design Construction—a project which aims "to examine construction methods and supply systems in the global film industry, engaging the space-making elements of film and set design as well as potential innovations around material use and reuse throughout architecture and construction generally."

Dulière holds a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard GSD and has worked as an architect and film-production design assistant since 2003. She was a designer at David Chipperfield Architects between 2010 and 2015 and later at Rotor Deconstruction in Brussels, where she was involved in large-scale projects relating to the reuse of building materials through "deconstruction" and design projects. She currently teaches at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels of La Cambre. 

"The movie industry has the potential to offer clues for streamlining material flows and offers opportunities for experimentation on sustainability for contemporary architectural practice," Dulière writes. For her project, she will visit a number of studios and on-site productions in several countries—including the United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary, China, India, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Russia—in order study reuse strategies for the film industry, with an eye to applications for long-lasting building and contemporary architecture practice.