Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption and trend of fellowships in academia today. These positions within the academic realm produce a fantastic blend of practice, research and design influence and traditionally within a tight time frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both themselves and the discipline at large. Fellow Fellows is about bringing attention and inquiry to an otherwise maddening pace of refreshed academics while giving a broad view of the exceptional and breakthrough work being done in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate. 

This week we talk to Linda Zhang who is currently the 2017-2018 Harry der Boghosian Fellowship at Syracuse University School of Architecture. 

1. The conversation, focus and applications to fellowships in general has exploded over the past decade. They have become the go to means of exposure, legitimization within the academia and in some respect the HOV lane of historically PhD owned territories of research and publication. What are your views of the current standing of fellowships as a vehicle of conceptual exploration? 


I see the rise of fellowships over the last decade as an outgrowth of a growing disciplinary shift in architecture towards an emphasis and understanding of “design research” as a legitimate mode of architectural knowledge production. Design as scholarly research or theory, however, is not yet at home in the academic institution or in practice; the former being too scholarly, the latter being too practical. As someone who is equally invested in thinking as making, I believe that fellowships provide a much needed bridge between the two, enabling emerging practitioners and educators to pursue a different kind of scholarship and practice than historical models. In that sense, fellowships are not so much a means of exposure or legitimization within academia as a necessity and demand in face of changing times.

2. What fellowship where you in and what brought you to that fellowship? 


I am currently the 2017-2018 Harry der Boghosian Fellowship at Syracuse University School of Architecture.  When I accepted the fellowship, I was working abroad in Berlin for Studio Other Spaces / Studio Olafur Eliasson. The studio has an incredible kind of energy—simultaneously both driven and compassionate—which affords you the headspace to develop your own work outside of the studio, making it all the more difficult to decide to leave. Ultimately, from those independent explorations, I was eager to figure out if there was something there that I would want to commit myself to full-time, even as a practice. It was at that point that I began considering fellowships and residencies. Prior to Syracuse, I completed a half year Fellowship-in-Residence at the Center of Art and Urbanistics (ZK/U) in Berlin.  While it was a great experience, there was a lack of alignment in terms of a shared discourse with the fellow ZK/U fellows. Being abroad, and intentionally working on the peripheries of the architectural discipline, it was not always possible to have the critical conversation and dialogues necessary to advance the work. This was in stark contrast to the first conversations I had with Dean Michael Speaks, who immediately understood the project I was undertaking. That was an exciting moment for me. It became very clear to me that there was an investment, here at Syracuse Architecture, in the kind of design research I am pursuing. The other aspect that made the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship standout compared to other fellowships was that it is still quite new; only in its second year. This meant that what the fellowship is, and what role the fellow plays in the school, was, and still is, largely malleable. As I am very interested in cross disciplinary engagement and dialogues, this was a very exciting aspect for me. Such collaborative work cannot always be laid out before hand, and having the freedom to shape these dialogues through various events—workshops, seminars, symposia, talks, and exhibitions—has been invaluable to the design research work throughout this year.

...a growing disciplinary shift in architecture towards an emphasis and understanding of “design research” as a legitimate mode of architectural knowledge production. 

3. What was the focus of the fellowship research? 


Ultimately, the fellowship research attempts to disclose, in its processes and its products, the act of making as thinking, the production of things as the production of thought. Specifically, the fellowship research focused on iterative casting as methodology for fabricating thought, thinking through making, which has embedded and inherent properties that necessarily push back against conventional architectural assumption about preservation and memory. Inherent to the medium and the process itself is the acknowledgement that every act of remembrance is founded upon forgetting. Something is always destroyed in the name of what remains—whether it is the memory, identity, or, in this case, the mold itself. Rather than attempting to resolve oppositions, slipcasting forces us to rethink the space of relay between them as a productive space which helps us relate to the past, helps us, in other words, to remember and forget at the same time. Rather than focusing on the cast itself, we focus, on the potential of the cast to produce relays of intangibles, and this, in turn, gives us a way to explore the power of the trace to evoke what is absent as well as what is present in the residue of the mark. In the wake of “making,” something is always—always—left behind.

The fellowship research offers itself as series of relays: between the tangible and the intangible, between what remains and what is left behind, between what is remembered and what is forgotten, between what is cast and the mold from which it is cast. And it is in these relays, in these spaces between, that we hope to expose the Real as the Beta-Real; expose fixed memory, fixed identity and fixed history as nothing more than traces of memories, identities and histories, each stable only for a fleeting moment, then gone, with a trace……In place of the Real, then, the Beta-Real names a “beta version” still in development, always already shifting, always fleeting, not yet ready for release. The Beta-Real encourages us to linger there, in that in-between, tarrying with the standstill: it is an opportunity to find new equilibriums in the present and past through the materiality of the invisible and that which seems irretrievably lost.

we hope to expose the Real as the Beta-Real; expose fixed memory, fixed identity and fixed history as nothing more than traces of memories, identities and histories, each stable only for a fleeting moment, then gone, with a trace……

But, if making is thinking, if the process of slipcasting is itself a form of cognition, then it is necessary to insist on the social and cross-disciplinary nature of these material explorations. Put simply, the design research was created from a sustained, multi-disciplinary conversation among participants at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, the College of Visual and Performing Arts Department of Ceramics and Department of Sculpture, and the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Religion. All of our “making,” which is to say, all of our thinking, took place in the Syracuse University Sculpture and Ceramic Studios housed at the College of Visual and Performing Arts’s Comstock Art Facility—all with the generous support of Syracuse University Studio Arts Ceramics Associate Professor Errol Willet, as well as all of the faculty and technicians at the Comstock Art Facility in the ceramic studios, sculpture studio, metal shop and wood shop. Similarly, a multi-disciplinary conversation invested in thinking through materiality and phenomenology was sustained through a series of formal events and informal discussions over the academic year with Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Syracuse University Assistant Professor of American Religion

4. What did you produce? Teach? And or exhibit during that time?

The fellowship was centered around two public events: the Beta-Real Symposium, and the Beta-Real Materiality of Loss Exhibition which opens May 3rd at 6pm with a gallery talk by K. Michael Hays. Teaching included two elective seminars focused on slipcasting as a methodology to address issues of contested memory and commemoration in architecture, as well as a Visiting Critic Studio which also focused on casting but this time in the contrasting mediums of concrete and seeded agar (a jelly growth medium) as a starting point for thinking through remembrance and bereavement when addressing a difficult past. One of my main objectives was to situate teaching with a larger context and disciplinary discourse by starting a dialogue with voices outside of the School of Architecture through formal and informal events and integrating those events with the course work.

Through the fellowship and with the support of Dean Speaks, I was able to organize a cross disciplinary symposium in place of the traditional fellowship lecture. This allowed me to bring a diverse group of thinkers and makers to the school. Furthermore, many of the panelists from the Beta-Real Symposium were invited to give talks and workshops in both the elective seminar and the Visiting Critic Studio.  For example, speaker Dr. Biko Mandela Gray (Assistant Professor of American Religion, Syracuse University) led a series of workshops entitled “Phenomenology of the Road” as part of the seminar “Excavating Ceramics: The Other Place, Ghosting Unspoken Nothings.” Speaker Ani Liu (artist and speculative technologist) gave a two day workshop entitled “Casting Living Cenotaphs,” and speaker William Stewart (PhD Candidate, Princeton University Department of German) gave a talk as part of the Visiting Critic Studio “Containing Elsewhere: Cenotaphs for the Burned Books of Bebelplatz, Berlin.” Through these events and interdisciplinary dialogues, the fellowship aimed to situate our class explorations in casting as simply one instance and one way to explore the Beta-Real through thinking and making.

The Beta-Real Symposium took place on March 23, 2018 from 2:00pm–6:00pm at Slocum Hall Auditorium, Syracuse Architecture. A diverse group of seven thinkers and makers explored the philosophical turn away from singular, knowable, stable, and metaphysical absolutes, towards a multitude of experiential, ambivalent, shared realities. Such ambivalent and unstable states have come increasingly to characterize our shared reality—from sites of contested memory and amnesia, to economics and identity politics in a globalized age of displacement, to scientific and technological revolutions. The Beta-Real names a search for alternative frameworks of understanding that might allow us to confront the contradictions of our contemporary reality.

Participants discussed how architecture might address and negotiate these states of contradiction, presenting their own designs and research and discussing in round table format how they each confront and navigate the Beta-Real. The speakers were: Yolandé Gouws, Artist, Berlin; Biko Mandela Gray, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University; Natalie Koerner, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ani Liu, Artist and Speculative Technologist, New York, NY; Bryan E. Norwood, Visiting Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University School of Architecture; William Stewart, Princeton University Department of German; and moderator Irene Chin, Curatorial Coordinator, Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal, Canada.

The fellowship research will culminate in an exhibition entitled “Beta-Real: The Materiality of Loss”, which will open with a special gallery talk in the Slocum Hall Marble Room on May 3rd at 6 p.m. by K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and interim chair for the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The work in this exhibition was made using slip casting—a technique commonly employed in the mass production of ceramics—to develop an iterative “thinking by making” protocol that offers, in its processes, and in the material results produced, an alternative to conventional architectural preservation and reconstruction. Specifically, the work exhibited produces architectural memories, identities and histories by focusing on three seemingly banal site-types: roadways, commemorative monuments, and the sites of performative rituals.

5. How has the fellowship advanced or become a platform for your academic and professional career? 


For a young practitioner and educator, the fellowship essentially acts as a launching pad. You are thrown right into the deep end with an incredible support system providing you with everything you need to succeed. For me personally, the fellowship has also been a return from Europe and, in many ways, a crash-landing back onto the scene. In that sense, it becomes a rich platform for many rich conversations, many of which are still yet to come.

You are thrown right into the deep end with an incredible support system providing you with everything you need to succeed.

6. What negative sides to a fellowship do you see? (if any) 


Speaking from my own experience, I have been fortunate not to have experienced the negative sides of a fellowship. This is largely due to Dean Michael Speaks’ vision for the role of the Fellowship not only within the school, but also the role of the Fellowship for the Fellow. As the Boghosian Fellow, anything is possible and ambitious is not only welcomed but generously supported. Every proposal I made as part of the fellowship was met with support by not only Dean Speaks but also by other faculty within the University. If you would have told me a year ago that I would be teaching an architecture seminar that took place within facilities of the School of Art’s ceramics and sculpture departments and additionally be collaborating with the department of religion to team-teach workshops on phenomenology of materiality, I would have told you there is no way to logistically realize such a transdisciplinary course in such a short amount of time. Yet, here we are.

There is an incredibly generous amount of support from departments across the university that goes into making that happen. I am extremely indebted to the generosity of Dean Michael Speaks (Syracuse University School of Architecture) and Prof. Errol Willett (Syracuse University Studio Arts, Ceramics) who have been instrumental in making this research possible. I am very grateful for the support of Prof. Jude Lewis (Syracuse University Studio Arts and Coordinator of Sculpture) and Director Stephanie James (Syracuse University School of Art) for generously accommodating my students in the studio space Comstock Art Facilities, especially considering the large-scale installation piece we have been making this semester. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful for the support, team-taught workshops, and sustained dialogue over both academic semesters with Prof. Biko Mandela Gray (Syracuse University Department of Religion) which have pushed the design research into new territory. At the same time, the school and the students benefit enormously from bringing in such new discourses, insisting that architectural discourse extends far beyond the doors of the school of architecture while showing students alternative paths they can pursue with their architectural education.

Beyond the bounds of the Boghosian Fellowship, one of the negative aspects one often associated with fellowships is the isolation and energy investment required in moving to a new place. While this is a necessary consequence of any fellowship, it is also not unique to fellowships. I moved to Syracuse without ever having visited the city before. Needless to say, I did not know anyone here. As a result, I had an incredibly luxurious amount of free time to spend on research and tangential reading. Looking back, this time was instrumental in the framing of my research here. Just like every act of remembrance is an act of forgetting and just like in the wake making something is always left behind, every decision has a consequence and these two things are necessarily intertwined. Singling out any one of the aspect from the other would miss the point entirely. With the fellowship being only one year, being new can be simultaneously incredibly productive and isolating—both being inseparable from one another.

7. What is the pedagogical role of the fellowship and how does it find its way into the focus and vision of the institution that you worked with? 


The Harry der Boghosian Fellowship was established by a transformational gift made by Paula der Boghosian ’64 EDU, to honor her brother, Harry der Boghosian, a 1954 graduate of the School of Architecture. The fellowship supports both research and the development of research-related curriculum and the possibility of interdisciplinary collaborations within the University and its various centers and colleges. As already mentioned above, pedagogically, the fellowship provided me with the opportunity to situate architectural design research within a larger cross disciplinary discourse beyond both the School of Architecture and Syracuse University. Through classes taught in collaboration across colleges within the University and through the Beta-Real Symposium, which brought to the School of Architecture a diverse group of thinkers and markers from across fields and geographies, my role as the 2017-2018 Boghosian Fellow has been able the support this experimental pedagogical agenda. It has provided me with the unique opportunity to spend a year teaching at the School of Architecture and developing a body of design research focused around “making as thinking,” while being able to situate that within a large context.

pedagogically, the fellowship provided me with the opportunity to situate architectural design research within a larger cross disciplinary discourse beyond both the School of Architecture and Syracuse University.

8. Where do you see the role of the fellowship becoming in the future and how does it fit within the current discipline of architecture? 


As I mentioned in the beginning, I see the rise of fellowship as a response to a growing investment in design research as a form of critical, scholarly, and practical knowledge production. Characteristic of a generation of young emerging practitioners and educators is a reinvestment in architecture as fundamentally inseparable from making and design. There is a shared understanding that making itself is a specialized and architectural form of scholarly research and knowledge production. While the fellowships are invaluable for supporting those early in their career, I’m curious to see how the discipline of architecture will evolve and adapt as this generation moves into their mid-careers.  Very soon, opportunities like the fellowship, will need to develop to support longer term design research projects and sustained dialogues. I’m excited to see how that might unfold to challenge the discipline of architecture both in terms of rethinking the curriculum, what defines scholarly research, and where the boundaries of practice are drawn. 

9. There is some criticism that a fellowship is a cost effective way for institutions to appropriate potent ideas while leaving the fellow with little compensation besides the year of residence and no guarantee of a permanent position? What is your position on this? 


While every fellowship is different, I can only speak from my experience at Syracuse Architecture, where these criticisms simply do not apply.  Syracuse Architecture offers competitive compensation in addition to providing funding for both an exhibition and a symposium. This kind of opportunity, support, and freedom would be hard to come by even for tenure-track faculty. I am keenly aware and very grateful for the unique the opportunity I’ve been given. In contrast to other fellowships, the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship is positioned within the School as a means of attracting young talent to the school with the intention and possibility of continuing at Syracuse Architecture in a different role after the fellowship has ended. While this certainly depends on many factors, and not all Universities have this luxury to make this happen, it is nonetheless still only possible through a commitment from Dean Speaks, which goes back to the point I made earlier about his vision also for the role of the Fellowship for the Fellow.

10. What support, and or resources does a fellowship supply that would be hard to come by in any other position? Why would you pursue a fellowship instead of a full time position? 


Assuming the question concerns full-time tenure-track teaching positions (as the fellowship is certainly a full-time position) what fellowships affords young educators and practitioners is the space and time to develop a research agenda through teaching. This is quite different from the agenda and role of tenure-track teaching positions and is also something critical for anyone at an early stage of their career. Often with tenure-track teaching positions, it can be difficult to balance teaching and learning the core pedagogy of the school against carving out enough time to develop a clear research trajectory. Fellowships provide an opportunity for that through a service release from both committee duties and thesis students, as well as the possibility to teach elective classes and studios which align to fellow research topics, in place of teaching within the core curriculum. Specific to the Boghosian Fellowship, I was given the opportunity to each two elective seminars in addition to a Visiting Critic Studio while simultaneously receiving funding to organize a symposium and produce an exhibition around the same themes. Furthermore, with the nature of elective course, students who chose to take my classes did so with an unspoken agreement that the class is an experimental research seminar and that the design research would largely be developed together, collaboratively, throughout the course.  I’ve been very lucky to work with a truly amazing group of students. As a fellow, the outcome of my courses where not required to already be set before the class began, privileging experimentation even at the risk of failure. In contrast, full-time tenure track positions play a different, but also crucial role, to the school and to the curricular education of the students.

11. What was your next step after the fellowship? 


I am still completing my fellowship.

12. What are you working on now and how is it tied to the work done during the fellowship? 


I have been invited to as an Artist-in-Residence at the Europe Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in Oisterwijk, Netherlands in 2019 through the Sunday morning Grant. The work I propose to produce there is very much a continuation of the conversations, workshops, talks, symposium with Prof. Biko Mandela Gray (Syracuse University, Department of Religion) through the Fellowship as well as the ceramic material investigation into slipcasting made possible through the generous support of Prof. Errol Willett (Syracuse University Studio Arts, Ceramics). Additionally, with the support of Dean Speaks, I am also working towards a publication and group exhibition that comes out of the Beta-Real Symposium.

13. What advice would you have for prospective fellowship applicants? 


Most people will tell you that a year is a very short amount of time and it’s important to have a very clear proposal of what you will do during this time to make the most of it.  I think it’s the opposite is also true. Fellowships are also an amazing opportunity to leave things open ended and to see where they might lead you.  It’s important to leave room for things to emerge and develop through the generous time, space, and focus the fellowship affords you. Don’t forget that a year while short, is also long.