The Graham Foundation is honored to announce the 2024 Carter Manny Awards for dissertations and research by doctoral candidates. Through this annual program, the Graham supports work that contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

The winner of the 2024 Carter Manny Writing Award is Y. L. Lucy Wang, Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, and the winner of the 2024 Carter Manny Research Award is Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. These projects, along with six citations of special recognition, were selected by an external panel of scholars.

Examining building codes in Hong Kong, hospital construction in Manchuria and Beijing, and modernist Chinese gardens in Shanghai, Wang’s dissertation, “Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949,” asks how the merging of medical and architectural expertise shaped the project of modernity in the Sinosphere.

Dionne-Krosnick’s dissertation, “Swimming Pools, Civil Rights, and the American City in the 1960s,” proposes that Black civil rights protests that took place at swimming pools contesting unjust racial and spatial segregation had the potential to radically transform the symbolic and physical built environment of American cities.

The Carter Manny Award program—named for architect Carter H. Manny (1918–2017) in recognition of his contributions to the Graham Foundation, as founding trustee in 1956, director from 1971–93, and as director emeritus—has granted 45 awards and 201 citations representing over $1 million in support of this important student work since its establishment in 1996. In 2024, the award acknowledgement increased: the Writing Award is $25,000 and the Research Award is $20,000.

The 2024 Carter Many Awards panel included Pep Avilés, associate professor of architecture, College of Arts and Architecture, Stuckeman School, Pennsylvania State University; Joseph R. Hartman, associate professor of art history, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City; and Adair Rounthwaite, associate professor of art history and chair of the division of art history, School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington.

Below is the full list of the 2024 Carter Manny Award winners and citations of special recognition. Learn more about the history of the award and browse a selection of past winners on the Foundation’s website.

2024 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD

Y. L. Lucy Wang
“Contagious Places, Curative Spaces: Disease in the Making of Modern Chinese Architecture, 1894–1949”
Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology

2024 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD

Arièle Dionne-Krosnick
“Swimming Pools, Civil Rights, and the American City in the 1960s”
McGill University, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture

2024 CARTER MANNY WRITING AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Yara Saqfalhait
“Building at a Distance: Architecture, Contractual Techniques, and Economies of Trust in the Late Ottoman Empire 1876–1930”
Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
This dissertation offers an account of transformations in the technical and procedural aspects of building at a distance from the imperial capital in the late Ottoman empire, as they were shaped by simultaneous processes of administrative centralization and economic liberalization.

Ecem Saricayir
“Property in Migration: The Making and Unmaking of the South Caucasus, 1878–1955”
Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; History of Architecture and Urban Development
Studying the material transformation and discursive production of the built environment of the South Caucasus alongside processes of forced and voluntary migration by focusing on shifting regimes of property in the region, this dissertation examines the dissolution of the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the emergence of nation-states from 1878 to 1955.

Shivani Shedde
“Projections of Possibility: Architectural Imaginaries of Afro-Asian Solidarity 1947–1977”
Princeton University, School of Architecture; History and Theory of Architecture
This dissertation explores how architecture was mobilized within postwar circuits of anticolonial and transnational exchange to articulate a language of solidarity and liberation.

Nicolas Verdejo
“Architectural Education Under the Iron Fist: Architecture Schools during the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile, 1973–1990”
Pennsylvania State University, Stuckeman School, Department of Architecture
Focusing on the Pinochet regime, this dissertation examines the impact of its policies on architecture schools in Chile.

 

2024 CARTER MANNY RESEARCH AWARD CITATIONS OF SPECIAL RECOGNITION

Sarah Saad Alajmi
“Between Nomadism and Settlement: The Architectural Transformation of the Arabian Desert, 1940s–1970s”
University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design
This dissertation researches the modernization and sedentarization of the tribespeople of Arabia in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which changed the desert architecturally and environmentally in the mid-twentieth century.

B. Jack Hanly
“The Environmental Professionals: Architecture, Regulation, and the American Landscape”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning; History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art
Looking at the rise of the environmental movement, this dissertation considers a corresponding transformation of architectural practice in the image of “environmental professionalism,” which sought to mediate disputes between public activists and private developers via ecological design techniques.