This year the Harvard University Graduate School of Design has awarded its coveted Wheelwright Prize to Daniel Fernández Pascual. The $100,000 fellowship funds travel-based research to support and investigate contemporary architecture and design. 

The Wheelwright Prize was established in 1935 and originally intended for Harvard GSD alumni but has since become an open international competition supporting an emphasis on "globally-minded research."

Fernández Pascual won the 2020 Prize for his research proposal: Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation. As the co-founder of Cooking Sections with Alon Schwabe, their research on architecture and changing ecosystems through food was previously featured in Archinect's print publication Ed, issue 2, "The Architecture of Disaster."

Archinect was able to connect with Fernández Pascual and learn more about his research.

Congratulations on receiving the Wheelwright Prize! With such a robust, multi-disciplinary background, how does your work change and progress the future of architecture?

The proposed project aims to look at different case studies where seaweeds and waste shells have been used as construction materials or alternative ways of caring for the coast. This will inspire new ways of recycling food waste into the building sector, while supporting alternative coastal economies and ecologies.

What inspired you to explore topics of visual arts, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics? 

We are living in an environmental crisis, and the current COVID-19 pandemic is just a manifestation of it. In that case, the cause is not just a virus but something much larger: How we are destroying the planet through urbanization, deforestation or encroachment of the natural environment. That requires complex methods to understand complex causes, and it is perhaps by bringing together different disciplines that we can find some answers, or even better, ask further questions.

How did "Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation" come about?

With my practice Cooking Sections that I co-run with Alon Schwabe, we have been working on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, for four years now; thinking of transitions to regenerative aquacultures and moving away from industrial salmon farming, which is creating dead zones all across the world. That urges us to think of alternative ecologies and economies for coastal communities and forms of intertidal cohabitation to care for the littoral.

In three words, how would you describe your work architectural research and discourse? 

Critical built environments

If there's one piece of advice you would give your younger self, what would it be?

Follow your gut instinct.

Fernández Pascual holds a Master of Architecture from ETSA Madrid, a Master of Science in Urban Design from TU Berlin and Tongji University Shanghai, and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Fernández Pascual follows Aleksandra Jaeschke, the 2019 Wheelwright Prize winner and her research project UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses.