The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Carter Manny Award. Since the establishment of this award in 1996, the Graham Foundation has awarded over $775,000 in recognition of promising doctoral students whose dissertation projects represent original and advanced scholarship in architecture and have the exciting potential to move the field in new directions. Two Carter Manny Awards are given each year, one for dissertation research and one for writing.

The winner of the 2017 Carter Manny Award for writing and a $20,000 award is James Graham, a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Graham's dissertation, The Psychotechnical Architect: Perception, Vocation, and the Laboratory Cultures of Modernism, 1914–1945, explores the rise of applied psychology, and particularly psychotechnics, and the way these sciences influence architectural pedagogy and practice between (and during) the world wars of the twentieth century.

The winner of the 2017 Carter Manny Award for research and a $15,000 award is Razieh Ghorbani, a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, The Space of Sanctions: Architecture and Construction in Contemporary Iran, explores how the culture of sanctions transforms architectural practices in Iran, and leads to new ways of imagining the city and the built environment.

Additionally, three students have been awarded Citations of Special Recognition for their dissertation projects. The list of citation winners follows below.

The award and citation winners were selected by an external panel after a competitive review of forty-four applications from doctoral students throughout the US and Canada who were nominated by their departments to apply for the award.

This year’s review panelists were Craig Buckley (Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University); Meredith TenHoor (Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute); Irene Sunwoo (Director of Exhibitions, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University); and Nader Vossoughian (Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, New York Institute of Technology).

The Graham Foundation offers this annual award in honor of the memory of Carter H. Manny (1918–2017) and his long and distinguished service to the Foundation since its inception in 1956, first as a Trustee, then as the Foundation's third Director from 1971–93, and as director emeritus in his retirement.

Applications for the 2018 Carter Manny Award are due November 15, 2017. To learn more, see the award guidelines here.

 

2017 CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

WRITING

Kera Lovell
Purdue University, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, American Studies Program
Mapping Power over Urban Green Space in the Age of Protest, 1968–1988

Nikki Moore
Rice University, Department of Art History
Agritectures of the Green Revolution: Architecture, Art and the Agrilogistics of Transnational Aid from the United States to the Caribbean Region, 1930–1978

RESEARCH

Matthew Mullane
Princeton University, School of Architecture
Worthy Objects: Architecture and Histories of Observation in Meiji Japan

 

Image: Hugo Münsterberg, The Vocation of the Architect, from Vocation and Learning (The People's University, 1910). From the Graham Foundation's 2017 Carter Manny Award for doctoral dissertation writing to James Graham for The Psychotechnical Architect: Perception, Vocation, and the Laboratory Cultures of Modernism, 1914–1945