Last fall, Ike Kligerman Barkley, the New York and San Francisco-based firm known for their thoughtful design of classic American residences, established a new traveling fellowship that would grant $12,000 to two graduate students for travel and research. 

Concerned by the general lack of knowledge about the canon of architectural history, the firm—comprised of three history buffs whose office boasts a 4,000 book library on the world of design—wanted to create a fund that allows students to consider the intersection between traditional and contemporary architecture. It is open to students, in their penultimate year of study, who attend a select group of top-tier architecture schools including RISD, Pratt, Cornell, and Yale.

The 2018 winners—and the first two ever IKB Traveling Fellows—have been announced as Rebecca Kennedy, from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and Evan Sale, from the Yale University School of Architecture. Kennedy will be using their grant to track rural vernacular construction techniques in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, while Sale will be looking at Rationalist and Neorationalist architecture in Italy and Switzerland.

In their proposal, Kennedy notes that the regions building traditions are under threat of extinction as concrete construction become the norm. The motivation, then, of her research is to document "the living examples of these buildings, analyze their construction techniques, and get oral histories from as many elders in the communities as possible to learn about the roles these buildings played."

Sale's proposal, on the other hand, is motivated by the trend of "Neo-neorationalism" among emerging practices, citing the rise of post-digital representation and a renewed historical consciousness as two signs of this. To that end, Sale will visit sites of Rationalist and Neorationalist development, analyzing their forms and researching their theoretical framing in the hopes of finding continuities between those 20th-Century movements and recent tendencies in the field.