Robert A.M. Stern Architects announced last week that they granted their 2017 RAMSA Traveling Fellowship to Kyle Schumann, a master's candidate at the Princeton University School of Architecture, for his submission “Alpine Modernism: Sensitive Identities and Regional Placemaking”.

The prize will fund Schumann's travels to Austria, Slovenia, and Italy, where he will study the work of architects Jože Plečnik, Otto Wagner, Edoardo Gellner, and Edvard Ravnikar. He argues in his submission that these specific architects engaged with “complex and often conflicting cultural histories, coupled with the challenging geography and climate of the Alpine region,” and therefore “necessitated an architecture intricately sensitive to material, cultural, and programmatic contexts.”

The jury — RAMSA Partners Melissa DelVecchio, Daniel Lobitz, and Grant F. Marani — was “intrigued” by Schumann's clear intent “to investigate Alpine architecture that mediates modernism and regional tradition,” they wrote. “His proposal to study how the region expresses itself in all scales, from small interiors, to houses, to civic structures, to urban planning schemes, is extremely relevant to RAMSA’s practice.” 

Awarded by the RAMSA partners since 2013, the $10,000 Travel Fellowship distinguishes architectural research that reflects the firm's own focus on “investigations of the perpetuation of tradition through invention”.  Students representing 15 of the 19 U.S. and Canadian schools that participate in the fellowship sent in a total of 46 submissions this year, more than double the number of entries in 2016.

The jury also awarded honorable mentions to these submissions:

Runner Up: Dimitri Brand (Yale University): “Architecture at the Center and Edge of Empire”

Finalists:
Ying Qi Chen (Princeton University): “Grafting on Traditions”
Yanling Deng (Columbia University): “In the Context of Tropical Asia: Vernacular, Colonial, Modernism and Neo-vernacular”
Claire Haugh (Yale University): ”Narratives of Our Ancient Past: The Greek and Roman Frieze”
Ellie Ziaie (University of Minnesota): “Union through Resurrection”