Madlener House
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.
RESEARCH
Provoking architecture’s response to climate instability through mobilizing field-specific intelligence to probe the complex materiality of the Great Green Wall, this project globally extends architecture’s disciplinary relevance and scope, and reveals provocative entanglements of geopolitics, economics, culture, land, and ecology under climate turn, positioning Africa as a transformative site of nuanced multiplicities in climate knowledge production.
PUBLICATION
Developed through the eponymous experimental exhibition in 2024, showcasing a site-specific intervention by Brazilian architect Carla Juaçaba within a brutalist house designed by Sidonio Porto in São Paulo in 1976, this publication features drawings, visual essays, and critical analyses to reimagine the relationship between historical and contemporary contexts in São Paulo.
PUBLICATION
Departing from a transatlantic curatorial project that occurred in Nigeria and the United States, this publication gathers a global, multidisciplinary constellation of artists, theorists, and writers to explore queer, decolonial, and anarchic models, as well as technological conditions, of pan-African collectivity for the twenty-first century.
RESEARCH
This research counteracts hegemonic frameworks behind environmental violence in Iraq’s Hawizeh Marsh through spatial analysis and archival research conducted in collaboration with the Indigenous Ahwari communities.
PUBLICATION
Assembling the definitive collection of writing on architecture and the city by El Lissitzky (1890–1941) in English, this book presents the substance and international perspective of his contributions to theory and criticism.
FILM
Going behind the battlelines of a contentious rezoning, this documentary film reveals how the storied artists’ community of SoHo became a neighborhood of luxury lofts and launched a “Yes In My Backyard”/“Not In My Backyard” (YIMBY/NIMBY) conflict.
EXHIBITION
This exhibition investigates the interpretations, representations, and visualizations of energy in architecture across history, and in various scales, from building details to landscapes, with a focus on New York.
EXHIBITION
Embodying a narrative of community and collectivity, this architectural barn raising, participatory performance, and installation at Art Omi Sculpture & Architecture Park amplifies the social, pedagogical, and cultural rituals rehearsed at the construction site with community participants and the public.
PUBLICATION
This monographic study of one apartment by Marco Zanuso (1916–2001) takes the architect’s home as a point of departure for understanding his approach to architecture and design during the industrialization of Italy following World War II.
EXHIBITION
Weaving a compelling storyline of rural memory in the Central American Dry Corridor—across El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua—this exhibition explores architectural investigations of impoverished agricultural communities, rural domestic lives, and entangled territories in the backdrop of the region’s economic instability and changing climate.
PUBLICATION
The first book to look at the lives and work of innovative, prolific American landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke (1892–1982) and Michael Rapuano (1904–1975) and their important contributions to shaping American public spaces during the early to mid-twentieth century.
EXHIBITION
The exhibition offers a unique perspective on urban detritus as a medium for architectural inquiry, challenging visitors to consider the invisible forces that influence urban design and social interaction.
EXHIBITION
Growing out of a forest-based alliance between Sapara communities from the Ecuadorian Amazon, anthropologists, architects, and artists, this exhibition deploys shamanic, spatial, and multisensory curation—animating shapeshifting pre-Hispanic figures—to expand audiences’ ecopolitical and territorial consciousness in the face of the human-driven environmental crisis.
RESEARCH
Counter to historical narratives that frame architecture as politically disengaged during the racial uprisings of the 1960s, this research shows how Black architects strategically deployed architectural thinking to challenge institutional power and advance community control.
PUBLICATION
This publication rethinks the ancient intimate relationship between bacteria and buildings to propose a more biotic and symbiotic architecture that partners with bacteria, and reconnects with soil, plants, and other species.
RESEARCH
Reframing King Kal?kaua's contributions to architecture by rethinking his approach to statecraft as a visionary patron of design—revisiting how his role as a Native architect and geographer, including his rebuilding of ‘Iolani Palace and revival of the Hale Nau? society—this research reveals how Indigenous architecture asserted Hawaiian sovereignty amid the foreign imperial pressures of his time.
PUBLICATION
Offering a new account of colonial urbanism and its continuing afterlives in North Africa, this book excavates the sedimented histories and multi-vocal lives of the bidonville, the Francophone equivalent to the shantytown.
RESEARCH
A research project that follows the evolution of modern architecture in Nigeria through projects completed by the country’s first post-independence Indigenous architecture firm, Niger Consultants, established in Lagos in 1970.
PUBLICATION
A new book that covers Cuban architecture, landscape, and urban design from before the 15th century Spanish colonization of the island to the present, including works by Cuban architects throughout the world.
EXHIBITION
Through the production of a three-channel video installation and a choreographic performance with an architecturally transformable kinespheric scaffolding, this project explores Black spaces of marronage and liberation in Black artistic production, architecture, and spatial practices in the American South.
RESEARCH
A portrait of the Mexican forests and the cycle of cultivation, extraction, transformation, distribution, assembly, and disassembly as a system of care.
EXHIBITION
This exhibition rediscovers the largely forgotten contributions of architects Alfred Clauss (1906–1998) and Jane West Clauss (1907–2003) exploring how their mentorship by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier influenced the Clauss’ design and development of the Little Switzerland community in Knoxville from 1939–45, sowing the seeds of regional modernism in the Appalachian South.
EXHIBITION
Two photovoltaic space frames float over the M&A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard and create a zone of performance, encounter, and cooling that attends to disciplinary questions of infrastructure, aesthetics, urban policy, and community energy provision through this outdoor public installation.
RESEARCH
This site-based research project works to develop an expanded video essay, anchored in the slow dissolution of Karlag, a massive former Soviet gulag in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, that was active between 1931–59.
RESEARCH
A research project studying the impact of climate migration on property and sovereignty in North America.
PUBLICATION
This multi-authored and multidisciplinary book offers a critical assessment of Illinois Institute of Technology’s role in transforming the historic Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side with a modern campus conceived by German émigré architect Mies van der Rohe.
RESEARCH
This project uncovers the expansion of Denver’s Auraria Campus into a Chicano community in the 1970s and the instrumental role of Mies van der Rohe’s disciples from the Illinois Institute of Technology as they coalesced to explicitly cite and adapt Miesian principles onto a Hispanic context.
RESEARCH
Archival and curatorial research that investigates the work of self-taught surrealist painter Rita Wolff, whose architectural paintings dominated the intellectual and cultural scene of architecture since the early 1980s.
RESEARCH
The Mekong Delta, with its extensive history of exploitation and environmental degradation, faces new challenges as political policies aimed at sustainable development paradoxically threaten the survival of traditional crafts and practices in Mang Thít, Vietnam, where an active consortium is urgently working to implement an alternative development strategy to transform the village’s cultural and architectural heritage.
RESEARCH
This project explores how planners in the United States sought to refashion the countryside in post-independence African states to curb urban migration in the 1960s and 70s.
PUBLICATION
This publication celebrates the traditional concept of Oríkì—the multi-generational practice of praise poetry and spoken affirmation amongst the Yoruba people of West Africa—within community and individual histories as a metaphor to explore the cultural significance of materials in the Western and South-South regions of Nigeria.
RESEARCH
Examining the concrete pillboxes that the Imperial Japanese Army constructed during World War II, this photographic research project highlights their gradual disappearance from the landscape.
PUBLICATION
In this book, Mary Miss—who works between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art— offers a visionary pathway for the future of urban design by presenting transformative ideas about the nature of public space and the function of artistic practices in catalyzing community engagement to solve local environmental challenges.
PUBLICATION
Highlighting architecture as the grandest form of instruction-based art, this publication explores the unique role of architects in contemporary practice and their role distinct from all the specialists involved in the design process and recognizes construction coordination drawings as conceptual tools.
PUBLICATION
This book engages the fields of environmental history, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial literature in expanding the role and imagination of the night in architecture.
PUBLICATION
Through the cultivation of an alternative educational setup, where spatial design acknowledges domesticity in a multidisciplinary approach, this publication explores new architectural tools with a critical, inclusive, and intersectional feminist framework.
PUBLICATION
This book shows how the gifting of buildings between socialist and decolonizing countries during the Cold War shaped cities and landscapes across Africa and Asia.
FILM
This film explores the life of architectural historian and activist Michael Henry Adams tracing his personal journey from Ohio to New York—drawn by the legend of the Harlem Renaissance—focusing on his decades-long fight to save Harlem’s historic buildings from demolition and his efforts to call attention to systemic racism within the world of historic preservation.
RESEARCH
Through a feminist biography of postwar architectural practice in the United States, this research follows the life and works of one of its workers, the Afro-French architect, adjunct professor, and crocheter Christine Benglia-Bevington (1936–2020).
RESEARCH
The research examines the sacralization of colonial-era infrastructure across India as a political project that attempts to preserve the ecologically detrimental practices of dam building as a nation-building mechanism.
PUBLICATION
A comprehensive presentation of the work of Camilo Jose Vergara, this book highlights photographs and interviews that tell the story of the evolution of Newark from 1977, when it thrived as an industrial city, to the present postindustrial city.
PUBLICATION
This book comprises fifty years of work by James Wines—American artist, architect, and founder of SITE, an environmental arts organization chartered in New York City in 1970—on a wide range of topics including art, design, environment, and education.
Copyright © 2008–2025 Graham Foundation. All rights reserved.
