The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Carter Manny Award. Since the establishment of this award in 1996, the Graham Foundation has awarded over $700,000 to support promising scholars whose doctoral projects shape contemporary discourse about architecture and significantly impact the field. Two Carter Manny Awards are given each year, one for dissertation research and one for dissertation writing.

The winner of the 2015 Carter Manny Award for research and a $15,000 award is Jesse Lockard, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, for her dissertation A City Is Not A Picture: Yona Friedman, 1945–2015. Lockard’s dissertation examines the French architect’s pioneering theories of participatory design and architectural imagery, analyzing how tensions between Friedman’s theoretical and pictorial practices inspired his invention of pictographic languages and drove his experimentation with postwar technologies and new media in the 1960s and '70s.

The winner of the 2015 Carter Manny Award for writing and a $20,000 award is Vanessa Grossman, a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Grossman’s dissertation, A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981, unveils the powerful coalition that formed in the postwar era between architects and the French Communist Party, which served as a critical agent in the massive reshaping of French cities.

Additionally, five students have been awarded Citations of Special Recognition for their dissertation projects, which include: an examination of the design pedagogy at VKhUTEMAS (Higher Art and Technical Studios) in Moscow in the 1920s and '30s; an investigation of architects’ use of terra cotta to create fireproof buildings in the late 19th-century U.S.; research on the craftsmen and building culture that produced Richmond, Virginia’s colonial and antebellum urban landscape; a study of mechanical drawing and the relationship between body and machine at the dawn of America's Industrial Revolution; and an interpretation of architectural “miniatures” in medieval China.

The winners and citations were selected after a competitive panel review of 41 applications from doctoral students throughout the U.S. and Canada who were nominated by their departments for the award.

The Graham Foundation offers this annual award in honor of Carter H. Manny and his long and distinguished service to the foundation since its inception in 1956, first as a Trustee, then as the Director from 1971, and since his retirement in 1993, as Director Emeritus.

To read more about the 2015 Carter Manny Award winners, click here.


2015 CARTER MANNY AWARD WINNERS

RESEARCH AWARD

A City Is Not A Picture: Yona Friedman, 1945–2015
JESSE LOCKARD
University of Chicago, Department of Art History


WRITING AWARD

A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981
VANESSA GROSSMAN
Princeton University, School of Architecture


CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

RESEARCH

Teaching Architecture to the Masses: VKhUTEMAS, 1920–1930
ANNA BOKOV
Yale University, School of Architecture

"Cities Unburnable!" Terra Cotta and the Architecture of Fire Safety in America, 1871–1916
JOHNATHAN PUFF
University of Michigan, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

WRITING

The City at the Falls: Building Culture in Richmond, Virginia, 1730–1860
ELIZABETH COOK
College of William and Mary, Department of History

Drawing Machines: The Mechanics of Art in the Early Republic
ELIZABETH EAGER
Harvard University, Department of the History of Art and Architecture

A Grain of Sand: Yingzao Fashi and the Miniaturization of Chinese Architecture
DI LUO
University of Southern California, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Image: Yona Friedman, collage on a postcard visualizing a Spatial City over Paris, 1960, Paris. Collection of Centre Georges Pompidou. Courtesy of Adagp.