The Graham Foundation announces 2021–22 Carter Manny Award honorees

The Graham Foundation has announced the winners of the 25th edition of the Carter Manny Awards recognizing emerging talent in the field of doctoral dissertation writing and research in architecture and design fields. The program has awarded 41 awards, 122 citations, and more than $900,000 in funding since being established in 1996. 

This year’s award winners offered comprehensive and diverse insights into the history of the built environment.

MIT’s Caroline E. Murphy took home the writing award for her dissertation Waters and Wealth: Rivers, Infrastructure, and the Territorial Imagination in Grand Ducal Tuscany, ca. 1549–1609 examining hydraulic engineering methods employed by the Medici government in Tuscany near the turn of the 17th century. 

This year’s research award went to Southern Methodist University’s Danya Epstein for her dissertation Archival Ruins: Dennis Numkena and Hopi Art History, an in-depth look into the life’s work of Hopi polymath Dennis Numkena, the first Indigenous person ever head an architecture firm in the United States. 

The jury panel also announced citation awards, which went to the following:

• Seçil Binboğa from the University of Michigan for Scaling the Region: Visuality, Infrastructure, and the Politics of Design in Cold War Turkey.
• Amy Chang from Harvard University for Architecture at the Edges of Empire: Seville, Manila, and the Formation of Spanish National Architecture, 16–17th Centuries.
• Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen from the University of Pennsylvania for Biocontainment Architecture: Constructing Race at the Border of Emerging Diseases and the American Nation.
• Matthew Slaats from the University of Virginia for Infrastructures of the Marvelous: Exploring contemporary, Black grassroots social transformation in the Southern United States.
• Y. L. Lucy Wang from Columbia University for Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949.
• Zhiyan Yang from the University of Chicago for Reinventing Architectural Culture in Post-Socialist China, 1979–2006.

Research awards receive a $15,000 acknowledgment while the writing award is for up to $20,000. 

This year’s panel members included the University of Singapore’s Jiat-Hwee Chang; Columbia GSAPP Assistant Professor Ateya A. Khorakiwala; and Architectural Heritage Center director Stephanie Whitlock. 

Applications for the 2022–23 cycle are due by November 15th.