Last week the Graham Foundation announced its 2023 Grants to Individuals, awarding 64 grants to 92 individuals. The funded projects range from publications and research to exhibitions, films, podcasts, and other digital initiatives and public programs that embody the Chicago-based foundation’s mission to promote innovative and interdisciplinary ideas that contribute critical perspectives on architecture and design.
These new grantees join the ranks of over 67 years worth of projects that have been supported by the Graham Foundation, including over 5,000 projects by individuals and organizations with a collective $43 million in direct support. This year’s group was chosen from among 500 submissions, and hails from nearly every corner of New York, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Argentina Paris, Portugal, Brazil, and even the foundation’s hometown of Chicago, among others.
Of the 64 funded projects, many include installations that opened last week at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale. These projects were presented in the main exhibition, The Laboratory of the Future, curated by Graham Foundation grantee Lesley Lokko, and include: The Uhuru Catalogues by Thandi Loewenson, which has won a special mention; TEXTURAL THRESHOLD HAIR SALON: Dreadlock by Felecia Davis; Black City Astrolabe by J. Yolande Daniels; and Index of Edges by Huda Tayob. In national pavilions, 2023 individual grantee projects include: La Casa Tappeto by Giovanni Bellotti, Alessandra Covini, and Adelita Husni-Bey in the Italian Pavilion curated by Fosbury Architecture; and Labor (Un)settlement and Migration Futures by N H D M: Nahyun Hwang and David Moon in the Korean Pavilion curated by artistic directors Soik Jung and Kyong Park.
Several of these recipients have won grants from the foundation in the past and have gone on to win numerous other achievements, such as Felecia Davis in 2021 for Hair Salon: Translating Black Hair Practices for Architecture Using Computational Methods, which was also recently presented at University of Houston; recent Emerging Voices recipient N H D M in 2019 for Interim Urbanism: Youth, Dwelling, City; Ana Miljački in 2016 for Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange and 2014 for co-curating the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and this year for her work on the architecture podcast I Would Prefer Not To. Others include AN writer and contributor Anjulie Rao and Anna Bokov in 2021 for her work on Vkhutemas and its related book Avant-Garde as Method. Her recently opened, controversial exhibition Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism, 1920-1930 was supported by the 2021 grant.
All 64 of the Graham Foundation’s 2023 individual grantees and their respective projects are listed below. More information on each can be found here.
Exhibitions
KJ Abudu | Lagos, Nigeria; London; and New York
Traces of Ecstasy
Giovanni Bellotti, Alessandra Covini, and Adelita Husni-Bey | New York, and Rotterdam, the Netherlands
La Casa Tappeto
Radhi Ben Hadid, Meriem Chabani, and John Edom | Paris
Muqarnas—Sacred Grounds
Gabriel Cira, James Heard, and Julian Phillips | Boston
Stull & Lee: Black Architecture Vision for an Infrastructural City
J. Yolande Daniels | Cambridge, MA
Black City Astrolabe
Felecia Davis | State College, PA
TEXTURAL THRESHOLD HAIR SALON: Dreadlock
Megan Echols and Dana McKinney | Miami and Washington, DC
Black—Still
N H D M: Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon | New York
Migrating Futures
Chandra M. Laborde | San Francisco
Transecological (Re)Imaginations in the Tenderloin
Thandi Loewenson | London, United Kingdom
The Uhuru Catalogues
Andrea Molina Cuadro | New York
Geo-Fantasies: A Space Race on Planet Earth
Marco Piscitelli | Oklahoma City
Rust on a Razor Blade: Mickey Muennig in Big Sur, 1970–2000
Tivon Rice | Seattle
A Pattern Language for Spatial Adjacencies
Huda Tayob | Manchester, United Kingdom
Index of Edges
Film, Video, and New Media Projects
Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn | London and New York
Design Emergency
Becky Beamer and Jori Erdman | Charlottesville, VA and Oslo, Norway
Witness: Design of the Tougaloo Center for Racial Justice and Equity
Joseph Bedford | Blacksburg, VA
Attention Audio Journal, Issues 8, 9, and 10
Kenny Cupers, Makau Kitata, and Chao Tayiana Maina | Basel, Switzerland and Nairobi, Kenya
Kamirithu Theatre: An Architecture for Decolonization
Maria Gaspar | Chicago
I Believe in the Things You Cannot See
Ana Miljački | Boston
I Would Prefer Not To
Vaissnavi Shukl | Ahmedabad, India
Architecture Off-Centre
Public Programs
Isabel Duarte, Maya Ober, and Nina Paim | Basel, Switzerland and Porto, Portugal
Etceteras: feminist festival of design and publishing
Liz Gálvez and José Ibarra | Denver and New York
Latinx Coalition Chats
Publications
Carla Aramouny and Sandra Frem | Beirut, Lebanon
Shifting Grounds [the ground between form and practice in Beirut]
Anna Bokov | New York
From Method to Style: “Elements of Spatial Composition” and Architectural Pedagogy after Vkhutemas
Kofi Boone and M. Elen Deming | Durham and Raleigh, NC
Empty Pedestals: Narratives on History, Race and Public Design
Craig Buckley | New York
The Street and the Screen: Architectures of Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema
Íñigo Cornago Bonal, Vishwanath Kashikar, and Christoph Lueder | Ahmedabad, India and London
How to Build with Time? Learning from Bimanagar, Ahmedabad, India
Alexander Eisenschmidt | Chicago
Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete
Makram el Kadi and Ziad Jamaleddine | Beirut, Lebanon and New York
From the Mountain to the Sea: Architectural Excursions in the Lebanese Landscape and Beyond
Yun Fu | Cambridge, MA
Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground
Arnika Fuhrmann | Ithaca, NY
In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City
Anna Goodman | Portland, OR
Citizen Architects: How Hands-on Building in Architectural Education Shaped a Nation
Elisavet Hasa | London
Building Solidarity Architectures: Social Movements, Welfare Crisis and State Abandonment
Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou | Barcelona and New York
EDIBLE; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism
John Keenen | New York
Tony Smith Architecture Catalogue Raisonné
Gili Merin | Vienna
Analogous Jerusalem
Faiza Moatasim | Los Angeles
Master Plans and Encroachments: The Architecture of Informality in Islamabad
Léa Namer | Paris
Chacarita Moderna: The Brutalist Necropolis of Buenos Aires by the Architect Itala Fulvia Villa
Anjulie Rao | Chicago
Weathered, Season 2
Judith Raum | Berlin
Otti Berger. Weaving for Modernist Architecture
Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió | San Diego
Inland Empire: Settler Colonialism, Modern Architecture, and the Rise of American Hegemony
Davide Spina | Zurich
Roman Leviathan: Architecture and Capitalism in Postwar Italy
Oscar Tuazon | Los Angeles
Los Angeles Water School
Stathis G. Yeros | Gainesville, FL
Queering Urbanism: Architecture, Embodiment, and Queer Citizenship
Claire Zimmerman | Ann Arbor, MI
Albert Kahn, Inc. and the Architecture of Capitalism, 1905–1961
Research Projects
Gouled Ahmed and Asmaa Jama | Bristol, United Kingdom and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Together we fled a realm
Toby Altman | Chicago
Prairie School
Carmen Amengual | Los Angeles
A Non-Coincidental Mirror
Tutin Aryanti | Bandung, Indonesia
Women’s Prayer Space: The Politics of Sex Segregation
Minne Atairu | New York
The Menstrual Isolation Room is a Spa!
Bruno Borgna, Mauricio Corbalán, and Pío Torroja | Buenos Aires, Argentina
Giving Voice to the Río de La Plata Basin
Stephanie Choi | New York
Twilight Requiem
Yasmina El Chami | Sheffield, United Kingdom
Building “International Goodwill”: American Campuses in the “Near East,” 1919–1964
Design Earth: Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy | Cambridge, MA
Elephant in the Room, and Other Fables
Curry J. Hackett | Boston
Drylongso: Imaging the Black Landscape
Suzy Halajian and Noah Simblist | Los Angeles and Richmond, VA
Cracks in the Edifice: Niemeyer’s Futuristic Fairground in Tripoli
Nusaibah Khan | Portland, OR
Productive Landscapes in Srinagar—A Case of Floating Gardens and Hanji Settlements of Dal Lake
Sharon Leung | Los Angeles
An Ode to Basement Workshop 1971–86
Paula Koeler Lira and Tatiana Pinto | Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm
Entangled Ecologies
Camila Palomino and Sean Vegezzi | New York
Civic Gaze
Deepa Ramaswamy | Houston
Reclaimed Lands: The Ecological Legacies of Colonial Bombay’s Coasts
Alex Strada | New York
House of D
Feifei Zhou | New York
Between Land and Water—Architecture of Porosity
