Yale School of Architecture scholars take home top honors at the 2023 Carter Manny Awards

Today, the Graham Foundation’s 2023 slate of Carter Manny Awards winners was revealed, recognizing the best new writing and research from within the architecture and design fields in what is now the Awards' 27th edition.

Two doctoral candidates in the History and Theory program at the Yale University, School of Architecture were selected for this year’s Carter Manny Writing Award and Carter Manny Research Award. Both are named in honor of the Foundation’s longtime director emeritus. The Graham Foundation says the Awards are meant to support work that "contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society."

Aaron Tobey won the Writing Award for "Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design," which "recasts narratives of a momentous 'digital turn' led by self-consciously avant-garde architects to instead show a longer, less deliberate trajectory of computer use that highlights the contingency of present practices as well as the assumptions they carry with them." Tobey is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

Tobey was joined by Jia Weng, whose dissertation "Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape" won the Research Award, offering an exploration into the development of heating and cooling considerations in 20th-century China across three exemplary "episodes."

The Foundation also recognized eight scholars with Citations of Special Recognition. They are as follows:

• An Tairan of Princeton University for The Incidental Artifactuality of the Observational Sciences in Italy, c. 1840–1880
• Deepthi Bathala of the University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning for Famine crops, Plantations, and Environmental Imaginaries: Botanical gardens in colonial and contemporary India
• Angelika Joseph of Princeton University for Red Power Takeover: Native American Activists, Colonial Landscapes, and the Design of Sovereignty
• Adam Longenbach of Harvard University for Stagecraft / Warcraft: The Rise of the Military Mock Village in the American West, 1942–1953
• Michael Moynihan of Cornell University for Aggregative Expertise: A Global History of Housing, Information Science, and the Deprofessionalization of the Architect, 1973–82
• Qiran Shang of the University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design for “It’s Only Dancing…”: Urban Spaces, Pleasure, and Resistance in Berlin, San Francisco, and Shanghai, 1924–1989
• Chelsea Spencer of MIT for The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, 1870–1930
• Sylvia Wu of the University of Chicago for Mosques on the Edge: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China

The deadline for applications for the 2024 Carter Manny Awards cycle is November 15th.