Yeo-Jin (Katerina) Bong, University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, is the recipient of the 2026 Carter Manny Writing Award.

This dissertation reconstructs how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural practitioners in the Papal States—particularly in Rome, Orvieto, and Ferrara, Italy—transformed the ground itself into a site of architectural knowledge. Confronted with collapsing foundations, unstable soils, and cracking tufa, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546), Giovanni Battista Aleotti (1546–1636), and Virgilio Spada (1592–1662) developed site-specific methods that combined empirical observation, artisanal practice, and visual documentation. Their drawings and reports reveal a new mode of architectural reasoning in which representation became a key tool for investigating environmental instability. Through analysis of unpublished archival and visual sources, this project traces how early modern practitioners learned to read, model, and manage the earth as an active yet unpredictable participant in design. The work specifically investigates how architectural ambitions for underground stability, adaptability, and resourcefulness were advanced by a group of architectural practitioners whom this project terms “geo-architects.” By recovering this geotechnical mode of thinking, this dissertation argues that such practices offered the papacy rationalized methods for controlling and negotiating the tension between environmental instability and its own institutional and theological permanence.

Yeo-Jin (Katerina) Bong is completing her dissertation at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, where she also earned her bachelor's of arts, and holds a master's of arts from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, engineering, geology, and the environment in early modern Italy, with a particular focus on the material conditions of the ground. Bong has received fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Linda Hall Library, the Palladio Museum, and the Renaissance Society of America.