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Tagged: chicago

Over $500,000 awarded to architectural discourse projects by Graham Foundation

By Niall Patrick Walsh|

Tuesday, Jun 23, 2026

Drawing Architecture Studio, “The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street – 2017.04.24” (detail), 2017. Digital drawing. Courtesy Drawing Architecture Studio. From the 2026 grant to Drawing Architecture Studio: Yan Hu, Han Li, and Xintong Zhang for the

The Graham Foundation has announced its recipients of grants for 2026. Over $500,000 was awarded to 54 projects “exploring architecture through exhibitions, films, publications, and research.”

In total, 86 individuals received funding from more than 600 submissions. Among the recipients are emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars, and writers.

In total, more than $46 million has been awarded by the foundation in 70 years, supporting over 5,300 projects. 

The 2026 projects funded are as follows:

Sarah Oppenheimer, “PT_G13,” 2026. Human operator, capacitance sensor systems, copper, glass, PLA, LED, aluminum, electricity, and existing architecture. Variable dimensions and duration. Installation view at V57 and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, the Netherlands, 2026. Photo: Paul Swagerman. From the 2026 grant to Sarah Oppenheimer for the exhibition “N-06”

Exhibitions

  • Juan Carlos Espinosa, Carlos A. Segura, and Tania Tovar (San José, Costa Rica and Mexico City, Mexico) for Procesos Salvajes [Wild Processes]
  • Liz Gálvez (Berkeley, CA) for Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth
  • Gerard & Kelly: Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (New York, NY and Paris, France) for Saints at a Disco
  • Suzy Halajian and Noah Simblist (Los Angeles, CA and Richmond, VA) for Cracks in the Edifice: The Fairground as Constellation
  • Nikolaus Hirsch and Jorge Otero-Pailos (Brussels, Belgium and New York, NY) for Becoming Monument
  • Drawing Architecture Studio: Yan Hu, Han Li, and Xintong Zhang (Beijing, China and New York, NY) for The Death and Life of an Apartment Building
  • Future Firm: Ann Lui and Craig Reschke (Chicago, IL) for The Stork's Stair
  • MOS: Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample (New York, NY) for A Stop
  • Sarah Oppenheimer (New York, NY and Rotterdam, the Netherlands) for N-06
  • Adriana Salazar Vélez (Mexico City, Mexico) for Weaving Nets for Water Worlds
  • David Taylor (Tucson, AZ) for COMPLEX
  • Norman Teague and Bernard Williams (Chicago, IL) for If Architecture Could Dance

Adam James Smith, “A neon-lit street scene in Shenzhen at night during a rainstorm,” 2025. Digital photograph. Courtesy Adam James Smith. From the 2026 grant to Adam James Smith for the film “Nighthawk”

Film and New Media Projects

  • Jay Cephas (Princeton, NJ) for Brick by Brick: Black Builders and the American Landscape
  • Crystal Kayiza (New York, NY) for The Gardeners
  • Adam James Smith (Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY) for Nighthawk

Iwan Baan, “’Anatomy of a Dhow,’” Bahrain Pavilion, Osaka Expo 2025, Osaka, Japan, 2023–25. Digital photograph. Courtesy Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture. From the 2026 grant to Ilaria Di Carlo and Daria Ricchi for the publication “Sympoietic Architecture. Making With Lina Ghotmeh”

Publications

  • Jana Ndiaye Berankova (Prague, Czech Republic) for Karel Teige's Theory and Criticism: Reflections on Architecture, Art, and Society
  • Marta Bertazzoni, Elisa C. Cattaneo, Simona Cesana, and Ugo La Pietra (Brescia and Milan, Italy) for Ugo La Pietra. Interior/Exterior: The Unbalancing Experiments
  • Santiago Bonilla Hastings, Daniella Camarena, Lucas Hoops, and James O'Brien (Mexico City, Mexico) for Ediciones Eje, Issues 04 and 05
  • Lori A. Brown and Sarah Rafson (Cambridge, MA and Syracuse, NY) for Now What?! A Call for Advocacy, Activism, and Alliances in US Architecture
  • Arthur J. Clement and Emily G. Makaš (Atlanta, GA and Charlotte, NC) for Philip G. Freelon: Artist, Architect and Griot
  • Christina E. Crawford (Atlanta, GA) for Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture
  • Ilaria Di Carlo and Daria Ricchi (London and Oxford, United Kingdom) for Sympoietic Architecture. Making With Lina Ghotmeh
  • Emilio Distretti, Sandi Hilal, and Alessandro Petti (Beit Sahour, Palestine; London, United Kingdom; and Stockholm, Sweden) for Entity of Decolonization. The Afterlives of Colonial–Fascist Architecture
  • Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich, Germany) for Knowing Trees: A History of Public Health
  • Yasmina El Chami (Sheffield, United Kingdom) for Collective Colonialism: Missionary Competition and Architectural Contestation in Ottoman Lebanon
  • Matthew Gandy (Cambridge, United Kingdom) for Urban refugia
  • María González Pendás (Ithaca, NY) for Holy Modern: Technocratic Fascism, Imperial Architectures, and Opus Dei
  • Christopher Hawthorne (New Haven, CT) for Punch List
  • Owen Hopkins, Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi, and Kathryn Yusoff (London and Newcastle, United Kingdom; and Nairobi, Kenya) for Architecture as an Earth practice
  • Lynne Horiuchi (El Cerrito, CA) for Dislocations: The Architecture, Planning and Building of Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II
  • Kate Joyce (Santa Fe, NM) for Watt or Fall
  • Wilfried Kuehn, Simona Malvezzi, and Hubert Pelletier (Berlin, Germany and Montreal, Canada) for Designing the Insectarium
  • Ana María León (Somerville, MA) for Spatial Solidarities: Architecture and Resistance in 1970s Chile
  • Abigail Lucien (New York, NY) for Blood of the Earth
  • Alex Martínez Suárez (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) for Concrete under the Sun: Brutalism in the Dominican Republic
  • Ciro Miguel (Zurich, Switzerland) for Brasília in 35mm: The New Capital through the Lens of Photojournalism, 1956–60
  • Guillaume Mojon and Veronika Spierenburg (Zurich, Switzerland) for Flora Ruchat-Roncati: The Mountain is the Wall
  • Leandro Villalba (Punta del Este, Uruguay) for The Architecture of Punta del Este 1948-1987

Roberta Dickinson, “My Lai Sculpture (with photographs by Ron Haeberle),” ca 1970. Photographic print mounted on cardboard, 10 5/8 x 10 1/4 in. Courtesy Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. From the 2026 grant to Adrienne Economos-Miller and M.C. Overholt for the research project “Trans Reconstruction: Roberta Dickinson’s Disobedient Archive”

Research Projects

  • Olorunfemi Adewuyi (Lagos, Nigeria) for Remembering Memory: (In)formal Architectures of Resistance
  • Shane Ah-Siong (Mauritius and New York, NY) for Military Architectures of Displacement: Documenting Spatial Erasure in the Indian Ocean
  • Ibiye Camp (London, United Kingdom) for Layt De Kam
  • Re'al Christian (New York, NY) for A Study of Two Cities: Seville, Kansas City, and Social Aesthetics Across the African Atlantic
  • Adrienne Economos-Miller and M.C. Overholt (Milwaukee, WI and Philadelphia, PA) for Trans Reconstruction: Roberta Dickinson's Disobedient Archive
  • Alexander Garduño and Veronika Kudriashova (Mexico City, Mexico) for Assembling Wood in Mexico
  • Vanessa Grossman (Philadelphia, PA) for Between the Rust Belt and the Amazon: Extraction, Empire, and the Architecture of Vila Serra do Navio
  • José Ibarra (State College, PA) for Andean Ecologies, Cosmologies, and Fictions across Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador
  • Duc Le (London, United Kingdom) for Vietnamese Protean Modernism and the Architecture of Thuận Tiến Nguyễn
  • Le'Andra LeSeur (Tulsa, OK) for As the Basic Repository of Inextinguishable Desires
  • Jorge Francisco Liernur and Isabella Moretti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) for Towards the Third Foundation of Buenos Aires: Facsimile Edition of Le Corbusier's Unpublished Plan (1929–1948)
  • Peter L'Official (New York, NY) for Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black's Black Arts Movement
  • Alex Maymind, Lauren McQuistion, and David Turturo (Albuquerque, NM; Minneapolis, MN; and Lubbock, TX) for Skyline: Rereading an Architectural Tabloid
  • Jeremy Melvin (London, United Kingdom) for Jo Noero: South African Architecture, Politics and Spatial Justice
  • Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (New York, NY) for The Proper Knowledge / The Proper Purpose
  • Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) for Future Tense – Queering the Third World Architecture

Related

graham foundation ● grants ● chicago ● research ● competition ● academia

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  • Eamez
    Eamez

    Eamez ·  Jun 23, 26 5:08 PM

    Architecture needs better funding sources for real design research. Graham Foundation is a toxic influence that pushes arch academia into further soft studies irrelevance. 

  • Comment as :

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Over $500,000 awarded to architectural discourse projects by Graham Foundation

By Niall Patrick Walsh|

Tuesday, Jun 23, 2026

Share

Drawing Architecture Studio, “The Samsara of Building No. 42 on Dirty Street – 2017.04.24” (detail), 2017. Digital drawing. Courtesy Drawing Architecture Studio. From the 2026 grant to Drawing Architecture Studio: Yan Hu, Han Li, and Xintong Zhang for the

Related

graham foundation ● grants ● chicago ● research ● competition ● academia

The Graham Foundation has announced its recipients of grants for 2026. Over $500,000 was awarded to 54 projects “exploring architecture through exhibitions, films, publications, and research.”

In total, 86 individuals received funding from more than 600 submissions. Among the recipients are emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars, and writers.

In total, more than $46 million has been awarded by the foundation in 70 years, supporting over 5,300 projects. 

The 2026 projects funded are as follows:

Sarah Oppenheimer, “PT_G13,” 2026. Human operator, capacitance sensor systems, copper, glass, PLA, LED, aluminum, electricity, and existing architecture. Variable dimensions and duration. Installation view at V57 and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, the Netherlands, 2026. Photo: Paul Swagerman. From the 2026 grant to Sarah Oppenheimer for the exhibition “N-06”

Exhibitions

  • Juan Carlos Espinosa, Carlos A. Segura, and Tania Tovar (San José, Costa Rica and Mexico City, Mexico) for Procesos Salvajes [Wild Processes]
  • Liz Gálvez (Berkeley, CA) for Earthen Comforts: Airing Earth
  • Gerard & Kelly: Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly (New York, NY and Paris, France) for Saints at a Disco
  • Suzy Halajian and Noah Simblist (Los Angeles, CA and Richmond, VA) for Cracks in the Edifice: The Fairground as Constellation
  • Nikolaus Hirsch and Jorge Otero-Pailos (Brussels, Belgium and New York, NY) for Becoming Monument
  • Drawing Architecture Studio: Yan Hu, Han Li, and Xintong Zhang (Beijing, China and New York, NY) for The Death and Life of an Apartment Building
  • Future Firm: Ann Lui and Craig Reschke (Chicago, IL) for The Stork's Stair
  • MOS: Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample (New York, NY) for A Stop
  • Sarah Oppenheimer (New York, NY and Rotterdam, the Netherlands) for N-06
  • Adriana Salazar Vélez (Mexico City, Mexico) for Weaving Nets for Water Worlds
  • David Taylor (Tucson, AZ) for COMPLEX
  • Norman Teague and Bernard Williams (Chicago, IL) for If Architecture Could Dance

Adam James Smith, “A neon-lit street scene in Shenzhen at night during a rainstorm,” 2025. Digital photograph. Courtesy Adam James Smith. From the 2026 grant to Adam James Smith for the film “Nighthawk”

Film and New Media Projects

  • Jay Cephas (Princeton, NJ) for Brick by Brick: Black Builders and the American Landscape
  • Crystal Kayiza (New York, NY) for The Gardeners
  • Adam James Smith (Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY) for Nighthawk

Iwan Baan, “’Anatomy of a Dhow,’” Bahrain Pavilion, Osaka Expo 2025, Osaka, Japan, 2023–25. Digital photograph. Courtesy Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture. From the 2026 grant to Ilaria Di Carlo and Daria Ricchi for the publication “Sympoietic Architecture. Making With Lina Ghotmeh”

Publications

  • Jana Ndiaye Berankova (Prague, Czech Republic) for Karel Teige's Theory and Criticism: Reflections on Architecture, Art, and Society
  • Marta Bertazzoni, Elisa C. Cattaneo, Simona Cesana, and Ugo La Pietra (Brescia and Milan, Italy) for Ugo La Pietra. Interior/Exterior: The Unbalancing Experiments
  • Santiago Bonilla Hastings, Daniella Camarena, Lucas Hoops, and James O'Brien (Mexico City, Mexico) for Ediciones Eje, Issues 04 and 05
  • Lori A. Brown and Sarah Rafson (Cambridge, MA and Syracuse, NY) for Now What?! A Call for Advocacy, Activism, and Alliances in US Architecture
  • Arthur J. Clement and Emily G. Makaš (Atlanta, GA and Charlotte, NC) for Philip G. Freelon: Artist, Architect and Griot
  • Christina E. Crawford (Atlanta, GA) for Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture
  • Ilaria Di Carlo and Daria Ricchi (London and Oxford, United Kingdom) for Sympoietic Architecture. Making With Lina Ghotmeh
  • Emilio Distretti, Sandi Hilal, and Alessandro Petti (Beit Sahour, Palestine; London, United Kingdom; and Stockholm, Sweden) for Entity of Decolonization. The Afterlives of Colonial–Fascist Architecture
  • Sonja Dümpelmann (Munich, Germany) for Knowing Trees: A History of Public Health
  • Yasmina El Chami (Sheffield, United Kingdom) for Collective Colonialism: Missionary Competition and Architectural Contestation in Ottoman Lebanon
  • Matthew Gandy (Cambridge, United Kingdom) for Urban refugia
  • María González Pendás (Ithaca, NY) for Holy Modern: Technocratic Fascism, Imperial Architectures, and Opus Dei
  • Christopher Hawthorne (New Haven, CT) for Punch List
  • Owen Hopkins, Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi, and Kathryn Yusoff (London and Newcastle, United Kingdom; and Nairobi, Kenya) for Architecture as an Earth practice
  • Lynne Horiuchi (El Cerrito, CA) for Dislocations: The Architecture, Planning and Building of Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II
  • Kate Joyce (Santa Fe, NM) for Watt or Fall
  • Wilfried Kuehn, Simona Malvezzi, and Hubert Pelletier (Berlin, Germany and Montreal, Canada) for Designing the Insectarium
  • Ana María León (Somerville, MA) for Spatial Solidarities: Architecture and Resistance in 1970s Chile
  • Abigail Lucien (New York, NY) for Blood of the Earth
  • Alex Martínez Suárez (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) for Concrete under the Sun: Brutalism in the Dominican Republic
  • Ciro Miguel (Zurich, Switzerland) for Brasília in 35mm: The New Capital through the Lens of Photojournalism, 1956–60
  • Guillaume Mojon and Veronika Spierenburg (Zurich, Switzerland) for Flora Ruchat-Roncati: The Mountain is the Wall
  • Leandro Villalba (Punta del Este, Uruguay) for The Architecture of Punta del Este 1948-1987

Roberta Dickinson, “My Lai Sculpture (with photographs by Ron Haeberle),” ca 1970. Photographic print mounted on cardboard, 10 5/8 x 10 1/4 in. Courtesy Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. From the 2026 grant to Adrienne Economos-Miller and M.C. Overholt for the research project “Trans Reconstruction: Roberta Dickinson’s Disobedient Archive”

Research Projects

  • Olorunfemi Adewuyi (Lagos, Nigeria) for Remembering Memory: (In)formal Architectures of Resistance
  • Shane Ah-Siong (Mauritius and New York, NY) for Military Architectures of Displacement: Documenting Spatial Erasure in the Indian Ocean
  • Ibiye Camp (London, United Kingdom) for Layt De Kam
  • Re'al Christian (New York, NY) for A Study of Two Cities: Seville, Kansas City, and Social Aesthetics Across the African Atlantic
  • Adrienne Economos-Miller and M.C. Overholt (Milwaukee, WI and Philadelphia, PA) for Trans Reconstruction: Roberta Dickinson's Disobedient Archive
  • Alexander Garduño and Veronika Kudriashova (Mexico City, Mexico) for Assembling Wood in Mexico
  • Vanessa Grossman (Philadelphia, PA) for Between the Rust Belt and the Amazon: Extraction, Empire, and the Architecture of Vila Serra do Navio
  • José Ibarra (State College, PA) for Andean Ecologies, Cosmologies, and Fictions across Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador
  • Duc Le (London, United Kingdom) for Vietnamese Protean Modernism and the Architecture of Thuận Tiến Nguyễn
  • Le'Andra LeSeur (Tulsa, OK) for As the Basic Repository of Inextinguishable Desires
  • Jorge Francisco Liernur and Isabella Moretti (Buenos Aires, Argentina) for Towards the Third Foundation of Buenos Aires: Facsimile Edition of Le Corbusier's Unpublished Plan (1929–1948)
  • Peter L'Official (New York, NY) for Invisible Plan: W. Joseph Black's Black Arts Movement
  • Alex Maymind, Lauren McQuistion, and David Turturo (Albuquerque, NM; Minneapolis, MN; and Lubbock, TX) for Skyline: Rereading an Architectural Tabloid
  • Jeremy Melvin (London, United Kingdom) for Jo Noero: South African Architecture, Politics and Spatial Justice
  • Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (New York, NY) for The Proper Knowledge / The Proper Purpose
  • Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) for Future Tense – Queering the Third World Architecture

Share

  • Follow

    1 Comment

  • Eamez

    Eamez ·  Jun 23, 26 5:08 PM

    Architecture needs better funding sources for real design research. Graham Foundation is a toxic influence that pushes arch academia into further soft studies irrelevance. 

  • Comment as :

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