Applications will be accepted online from January 20 to February 28 at www.wheelwrightprize.org.
Harvard GSD announces 2014 edition of the Wheelwright Prize
Competition for 100,000 USD traveling fellowship open to early-career architects
Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the second edition of the Wheelwright Prize, an open international competition that awards a 100,000 USD fellowship to a talented early-career architect to support travel-based research. Awarded annually, the 2014 Wheelwright Prize will begin accepting applications on January 20. The deadline for completed applications is February 28. The prize is dedicated to fostering new forms of architectural research informed by cross-cultural engagement.
In 2013, Harvard GSD revamped the Arthur W. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established in 1935 in memory of Wheelwright, Class of 1887. Intended to encourage the study of architecture outside the United States at a time when international travel was difficult, the prize was formerly available only to GSD alumni; past fellows have included Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, William Wurster, Christopher Tunnard, I. M. Pei, Klaus Herdeg, Farès el-Dahdah, Adele Santos, and Linda Pollak.
Last year, Harvard GSD opened the competition to architects practicing anywhere in the world, asking applicants to propose research agendas that bring them outside their country of residence. An affiliation to the GSD is no longer required. The primary eligibility requirement is that applicants must have received a degree from a professionally accredited architecture program in the past 15 years.
“The GSD is a truly global design school, based at one of the leading research universities in the world,” GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi remarked. “It is clear that today’s fluid movement of people and ideas necessitates new approaches towards the understanding of architecture and urbanization. I am excited that in the coming years the Wheelwright Fellowship will be able to have a significant impact on the intellectual projects of young architects and, in turn, on the future of architecture and the built environment.”
In May 2013, Harvard GSD introduced the winner of the 2013 Wheelwright Prize, Gia Wolff, a 35-year-old Brooklyn-based architect who worked previously for Acconci Studio, LOT-EK, Adjaye Associates, and Architectural Research Office (ARO). The jury—which included Dean Mostafavi, Harvard professors Michael Hays and Jorge Silvetti, Beijing architect Yungho Chang, historian and previous Wheelwright fellow Farès el-Dahdah, London-based architect Farshid Moussavi, and Zoe Ryan, architecture curator at the Art Institute of Chicago—selected Wolff’s proposal, Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, from hundreds of applications originating from 45 countries. Wolff’s project examines the tradition of parade floats—elaborate, temporary, mobile constructions created every year for carnival festivals around the world—and their implications for contemporary architectural concerns such as prefabrication, mobility, temporality, performance, spectacle, and community-based production.
Applicants will be asked to submit a portfolio of personal work (maximum of 10 images), which may be supplemented by published articles written by the applicant; as well as a proposal for a research project supported by a travel itinerary. The jury will select a winner based on the quality of the applicant’s design work, scholarly accomplishments, originality or persuasiveness of the research proposal, and evidence of ability to fulfill the proposed project.
The Wheelwright Prize’s organizing committee includes Harvard GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, Professors K. Michael Hays and Jorge Silvetti, and Assistant Dean Benjamin Prosky. An international jury will be announced in January 2013. Applications will be accepted online from January 20 to February 28 at www.wheelwrightprize.org. A winner will be named in April 2014.
For more information, email [email protected].
