Wheelwright Prize: The Latest Architecture and News

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.

The rise of co-living has begun to radically shape interior design. In residential projects and commercial developments, co-living is tied to the emergence of the Kitchenless Home idea. Began by Spanish architect Anna Puigjaner, this idea is tied to a range of innovations in interior design and co-living that have been built over the last five years. In turn, these new interiors began to tell a story of housing and spatial experience rooted in modern life.

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Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Marina Otero as the winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize. The 100,000 USD grant funds two years of research and travel to support contemporary architecture's investigative approaches, with an emphasis on globally minded research. The winning proposal, “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse”, examines a new architecture paradigm for storing digital data. The project looks at how reimagining digital infrastructures could provide answers to the unprecedented demands facing the world today. The field research, data collection, and prototype development will result in an open-source manual for data center architecture design containing examples of ecological, circular, and egalitarian data storage models.

Germane Barnes has won the 2021 Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The $100,000 prize will fund two years of travel and research for Barnes’s proposal Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, an examination of classical Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors. Barnes will study how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new possibilities within investigations of Blackness.

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Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Daniel Fernández Pascual as the winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries, with a $100,000 grant intended to support two years of study. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize drew over 170 applicants from over 45 countries.

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Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced three shortlisted architects for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries, with a $100,000 grant intended to support two years of study. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize drew 168 applicants from over 45 countries.

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The Harvard Graduate School of Design has initiated a call for submissions for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize, an open international competition that awards $100,000 to a “talented early-career architect to support expansive, intensive design research.” This annual prize is dedicated to advancing original architectural research that is informed by cross-cultural engagement and that shows potential to make a significant impact on architectural discourse.

Architect Aleksandra Jaeschke has been named the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2019 Wheelwright Prize. Jaeschke receives a $100,000 traveling fellowship to fund her research proposal UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses. The fellowship and grant are designed to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on travel-based research.

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The Harvard Graduate School of Design has initiated a call for submissions for the 2019 Wheelwright Prize, an open international competition that awards $100,000 to a “talented early-career architect to support travel-based research.”

With an open competition process, the Wheelwright Prize recognizes the importance of field research to professional development and reinforces Harvard GSD’s dedication to fostering investigative approaches to contemporary design. The winning entrant will join previous winners such as Aude-Line Duliere in 2018, Samuel Bravo in 2017, and Anna Puigjaner in 2016.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced the four finalists for the 2018 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 travel research-based grant available to early-career architects worldwide.

Selected from over 125 applications from nearly 40 countries worldwide, the four finalists are from Belgium, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. This year’s jury includes 2014 Wheelwright Prize Winner Jose Ahedo, Edward Eigen, Frida Escobedo, K. Michael Hays, Mark Lee, Mohsen Mostafavi, and Michelle Wilkinson. A winner will be named in April.

Read more about the four finalists below: 

Chilean architect Samuel Bravo has been selected as the winner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2017 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 travel grant established to support “investigative approaches to contemporary design.”

Bravo’s research proposal, Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements, seeks to study the architecture of traditional and informal settlements, offering a contemporary revisiting of Bernard Rudofsky’s “architecture without architects” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964.

Architect Anna Puigjaner imagines a future in which housing is suited to the needs of its inhabitants. Sometimes that happens to mean not having a kitchen. Her project “Kitchenless” has received the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University, along with an endowment of $100,000 for research on existing models of communal residences worldwide.

Puigjaner and the other members of the Maio firm work alongside professionals from other disciplines in a beautiful spot in the Gracia district in Barcelona, which functions more as a co-working space than a conventional architectural office. The Maio team opted for this place in 2011, during the crisis, so in order to hold on to it they decided to open the space to other workers. In 2016 they could afford to be alone, but there isn’t any compelling reason for them to do it. This could be a summary of their philosophy and is surely one of the reasons why Puigjaner received the Wheelwright Prize, a unique prize among architecture awards as it doesn’t focus on a specific work or research but the relationship between the two, in direction and ideas.

She does the interview from her office and talks about the changes that lie ahead for the future of housing:

Anna Puigjaner has been selected from nearly 200 applications as the winner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2016 Wheelwright Prize. The $100,000 travel grant was awarded for her proposal, Kitchenless City: Architectural Systems for Social Welfare, for which she will study “exemplars of collective housing in Russia, Brazil, Sweden, China, Korea, and India, which reflect a variety of approaches to organizing and distributing domestic spaces.” Puigjaner notes that this typology is "deeply understood as a tool for social transformations," and through her investigation, she hopes to apply new thinking to the housing dilemmas of today. The prize will fund her travel and research over the next two years.

Harvard GSD has announced the four shortlisted architects for the 2016 Wheelwright Prize. Awarded annually, the $100,000 grant is for travel-based architectural research.

Selected from 200 applications from nearly 45 countries worldwide, the four finalists are from Italy, Spain and Chile. Each finalist will present their work and proposal on April 20. This year’s jury includes Eva Franch, Jeannie Kim, Kiel Moe, Rafael Moneo, Benjamin Prosky, Mohsen Mostafavi, and K. Michael Hays.

Singapore-based American architect Erik L’Heureux has been selected over two other finalists and 200 applicants to receive the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's (GSD) 2015 Wheelwright Prize. The $100,000 travel grant, now in its third year, was awarded to L’Heureux for his proposal Hot and Wet: The Equatorial City and the Architectures of Atmosphere, which focuses on the "architecture of five dense cities in the equatorial zone - Jakarta, Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Pondicherry, India; Lagos, Nigeria; São Paulo, Brazil - where he will examine traditional and modern building strategies that mediate extreme climate conditions while addressing the mounting pressures of rapid urbanization and climate change."