Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Jingru (Cyan) Cheng as the recipient of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize, a study grant created to support globally-minded research and investigative approaches to contemporary architecture. The winning research project, titled “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” delves into the multifaceted impacts of sand mining and reclamation, understood from cultural, economic, and ecological perspectives. The unassuming material has become an indispensable element for our built environment and human communities, serving as a vital component in the production of glass, concrete, asphalt roads, and artificial land. Yet the process of dredging underwater systems and sand mining leads to the disruption of habitats in a process that simultaneously shapes one habitat while devastating another.

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On the banks of the river Seine, just east of the Île de la Cité and downtown Paris, stand the four glittering towers of the National Library of France. Bent around the outskirts of a public esplanade, these towers are Dominique Perrault’s modern take on the age-old Parisian tradition of monumental public architecture. The project is both volume and void, enclosure and exposure, a juxtaposition of contrasting ideas that is as reverent of its place in a thousand-year-old legacy as it is deliberately self-critical.

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