An Tairan
“The Incidental Artifactuality of the Observational Sciences in Italy, c. 1840–1880”
Princeton University, School of Architecture
2023 Carter Manny Award Writing Citation

This project investigates the erratic media byproducts and unintended artifactual consequences both triggered and revealed by a group of research institutions established for the scientific observation of nature in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Italy.

Deepthi Bathala
“Famine crops, Plantations, and Environmental Imaginaries: Botanical gardens in colonial and contemporary India”
University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
2023 Carter Manny Award Writing Citation

The genealogy of the earliest colonial botanical gardens in India illustrates a contingent colonial project of improvement, that of constructing regional climate imaginaries corresponding to ephemeral agricultural landscapes, contested, mediated and negotiated by human and non-human actors.

Angelika Joseph
“Red Power Takeover: Native American Activists, Colonial Landscapes, and the Design of Sovereignty”
Princeton University, Humanities Council and School of Architecture
2023 Carter Manny Award Research Citation

This dissertation examines the strategies by which Red Power Movement activists designed social, cultural, and political transformations, weaponizing landscapes shaped by their oppressors against the state and creating new worlds within old architectural forms.

Adam Longenbach
“Stagecraft / Warcraft: The Rise of the Military Mock Village in the American West, 1942–1953”
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
2023 Carter Manny Award Research Citation

This dissertation investigates the mid-twentieth century rise of the military "mock village," experimental sites where novel ways of seeing and constructing architecture coincided with the production of new forms of violence and destruction.

Michael Moynihan
“Aggregative Expertise: A Global History of Housing, Information Science, and the Deprofessionalization of the Architect, 1973–82”
Cornell University, Department of Architecture
2023 Carter Manny Award Writing Citation

This dissertation focuses on three projects funded by national governments (Mexico, Argentina, and Spain) to demonstrate that in the 1970s, expertise related to housing shifted from professional architects to aggregate experts working in entrepreneurial/consultancy groups, governmental research institutions, and international development aid agencies.

Qiran Shang
“It’s Only Dancing…: Urban Spaces, Pleasure, and Resistance in Berlin, San Francisco, and Shanghai, 1924–1989”
University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design
2023 Carter Manny Award Research Citation

Analyzing how people have historically made spaces of popular dance into sites of resistance, this dissertation illuminates gay and lesbian dance venues in 1920s Berlin, countercultural landscapes of dance in 1960s San Francisco, and students’ spontaneous dance parties and queer ballrooms in 1980s Shanghai by studying rare films and photographs, memoirs, oral testimonies, as well as maps and building plans.

Chelsea Spencer
“The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building, 1870–1930”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture + Planning
2023 Carter Manny Award Writing Citation

At once a media history of the construction industry and a shadow history of modern architecture, this dissertation traces the rise of general contracting in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Sylvia Wu
“Mosques on the Edge: Tale and Survival of Muslim Monuments in Coastal China”
University of Chicago, Department of Art History
2023 Carter Manny Award Writing Citation

The dissertation is a close study of the Qingjing Mosque complex in Quanzhou, China, whose medieval and contemporary sections have distinct histories but are made to conform to a coherent historical narrative that subsequently allows the site's newly constructed architectural profile to eclipse that of its premodern past.