Washington University in St. Louis alum Adare Brown wins the $75K Steedman Fellowship in Architecture

The College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis has announced its selection of alum Adare Brown as the winner of its 2023-24 James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture.

The $75,000 fellowship, organized in partnership with the AIA St. Louis, supports research opportunities through international travel and is one of the largest grantmaking programs for architecture in the United States. 

Brown’s winning proposal “Counter Planning from St. Louis” responded to this year’s theme of ‘Care’ with a look at social housing as an act of care using examples from Colombia, Italy, and Thailand.

"Brown’s proposal engages a wider view of the profound effect housing has on community and health, providing evidence that housing can have a broader meaning of shelter and care,” Tatiana Bilbao, the jury’s Chair, said speaking of their approach to the research project. “The proposal was well articulated and displays the connection to the research, resulting in a universal theme that translates across geographical locations and can have a global impact on contemporary and historic themes of research surrounding social housing and care.”

The Class of 2017 BFA graduate and current Project Manager at Brooklyn's STAT Architecture foregrounded their focus by revisiting the mythologized determination displayed by residents and stakeholders of the city’s ill-fated Pruitt-Igoe development in the years following the realization of Minoru Yamasaki’s failed post-war housing vision.

Brown explains: "With its infamous demolition, the tenant organizing and trade unionists that fought for the right to maintain the complex have gone untold outside of labor history. That rhetorical gesture made care as an architectural act illegible. In this project, I will revisit and celebrate the architectures of care made possible by social housing.”

The project will culminate in a new publication and special public conversation event in St. Louis featuring other scholars in whose footsteps Brown's work follows. 

Joining Brown were the two Honorable Mention winners Gabriela Suarez and Julian Geltman.