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4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.
Producing and hosting exhibitions of work by architects, designers, and artists, a83 prioritizes projects that foreground conversations about spatial representation and contemporary image making practices.
Reframing the Cross Bronx Expressway from mythological projection to material fact, this exhibition includes new photography and oral histories that examine the roadway from the perspective of the neighborhoods it traverses and help chart future paths to remake the corridor.
Capturing the transformative journey from the largest mass closing of public schools in United States history in Chicago in 2013, this publication details the shift from shuttered schools to bold community empowerment.
This edited volume renegotiates the transformative potentials of the concept of landscape through a collection of essays by scholars and emerging researchers in architecture, anthropology, philosophy, earth sciences, geography, and history, building on a three-year participatory landscape restoration project in the Greek islands of Santorini and Therasia.
Developed following the Brazilian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, this publication highlights the work that embraces the planet in ecological dimensions through an assemblage of images, texts, maps, and archives from participants, including the communities Mbya-Guarani, Tukano, Arawak and Maku, as well as the Alaká Weavers (Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá), and Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká.
A film series that raises local and international awareness on alternative modes of engagement between architects, building sites, and communities.
Through the work of the architect Tatiana Bilbao and the Mexico City-based Tatiana Bilbao Studio, this immersive exhibition interrogates notions of domesticity, communal space, and urban living.
This exhibition traces the life and work of architect Phyllis Birkby (1932–1994) and a broader community of lesbian feminist artists and activists who pushed women in both the design professions and general public to visualize their fantasy environments and imagine homes and cities beyond the confines of existing male-dominated architectural forms.
This speculative publication, edited with Mpho Matsipa, critically revisits creative and collective projects gathered under the African Mobilities project (2018–20) to bring together creative design, research practices, and intellectual communities across Africa and the global diaspora.
An exploration of the contemporary challenges and opportunities in achieving neighborhood-led change in Harlem, this symposium does so through the lens of the 60th anniversary of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH).
This multifaceted exhibition program and long-standing debate series probes the political and social role of architects within the city.
This exhibition is a concise yet rich examination of Frederick John Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s.
Examining the role of nature as a starting point, this exhibition considers material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science.
Bringing concepts from critical disability studies scholarship, activism, and arts into architecture, this online repository richly informs and supports more inclusive and accessible design practices.
A print journal focused on design as social practice.
A multiyear cycle of interdisciplinary gatherings and site-specific actions in Northern California’s wildfire landscapes.
This series deploys lectures, workshops, and open sessions to build transnational conversations around spatial politics, particularly in geographies where they remain inadequately addressed.
A comprehensive overview of Andrea Blum’s exploration of the relationship of art and architecture from the mid–1970s to the present, this exhibition foregrounds her ongoing practice of creating sculpture, digitally constructed images, and video to posit the natural world in juxtaposition with a constructed one.
Featuring Don Polo—a farmer-potter in the Indigenous village of San Bartolo Coyotepec, Oaxaca, Mexico—this film celebrates traditional design legacies by presenting the site-specific clay techniques that represent the mastery of earth, fire, air and water, to document a craft that dates back more than 3,500 years.
This publication reconsiders experimental social architecture through the lens of Christopher Alexander’s 1975 Mexicali project, a complex aimed at solving the public housing crisis by involving people in building their own homes using the architect’s influential “pattern language.”
Through an exploration of the work of the visionary Austrian architect, theater designer, and theorist Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965), and chiefly Kiesler’s research and teaching at Columbia University School of Architecture in the late 1930s and 1940s, the book features the main projects he developed through the Laboratory for Design Correlation—the Vision Machine and the Mobile Home Library.
This concert series presents the work of music’s leading experimentalists.
Featuring young Latin-American architects in this annual exhibition program, the forthcoming shows include presentations by Departamento Del Distrito, grua.a, and DUB Arquitectura.
Announcing the award of $390,000 to support 33 projects led by organizations around the world.
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Announcing the 2024 Carter Manny Awards for doctoral candidates' dissertations and research, which include an award for writing, research, and six citations of special recognition.
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Applications for the 2025 grant cycle are now open for both individuals and collaborative groups. The deadline to apply is September 15, 2024.
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Announcing the award of $519,550 for 56 new grants to individuals.
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As the first major exploration of the influential second-generation Modernist architect, Paul Rudolph, this exhibition charts the rapid rise, precipitous decline, and eventual reemergence, of a career that spanned an astonishing range of projects—from early experimental houses during the 1950s to Brutalist civic projects and utopian proposals of the 1960s, through to his visionary 1970s New York interiors, and finally a late career revival in East Asia building large-scale corporate and mixed-use projects.
For this sixth iteration, the curators posit New Orleans as globally relevant for examining our collective future as it relates to climate change, legacies of colonialism, and definitions of “home.”
A student, academic, and professional platform for a multifaceted conversation within the architectural discourse regarding the questions and possibilities present within the future of the design discipline.
This yearlong research and exhibition series focuses on the ethical and technical entanglements of water, taking the murky soil and unstable grounds of swamps as a conceptual framework to highlight the ecological and socioeconomic intricacies that lie at the threshold between bodies of water and land.
Addressing the ecological, social, and geopolitical dimensions of energy and its production—both historically and today—this international group exhibition and program takes its starting point from a little-known piece of East Village-history.
Through a collection of essays, drawings, and artwork by and about the preeminent architectural historian, critic, and educator Richard Ingersoll (1949–2021), this book presents his prolific, independent voice with a unique cross-cultural and ethical perspective, that was admired for consistently positioning architecture as a social and political act, and anticipated the current urgent discourse on climate action, environmental justice. and civic responsibility.
This student-run publication at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles, provides an outlet for creative work that traditionally falls outside of the scope of academic architectural institutions.
This annual publication launches ideas and conversations happening within the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture into the world.
This project is a reimagination and redesign of the journal's publishing structure as a series of imprints for building networks and generating critical writing for architects, theorists, artists, designers and other makers interested in non-conventional, innovative, disruptive processes of research and scholarship.
Supporting a cohort of emerging writers, this program includes dedicated mentorship, guest lectures and workshops, engaged feedback, and short- and long-form publishing opportunities.
The sixth edition of the annual day-long conference held in New York City returns with a summit exploring the now, near, and next of architecture, design, and beyond and will include three winners of The World Around’s Young Climate Prize.
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