Harvard's Graduate School of Design announced the winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize: architect and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture Germane Barnes will receive the coveted $100,000 fellowship fund to support his two-year research project Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture. Barnes proposes to examine Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors, studying "how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new architectural possibilities that emerge within investigations of Blackness."
Germane Barnes' research proposal was selected from a field of finalists that also included Iulia Statica, Luis Berríos-Negrón, and Catty Dan Zhang.
"The past year has shown the world that marginalized communities offer more than a cursory look but a thorough excavation of their contributions and legacies," Barnes said. "As a Black architect, I have struggled with the absence of my identity in the profession, and there have been moments where I have questioned my talent and ideologies because they failed to gain recognition in prominent architecture circles. To believe that the only way to measure success is acceptance was a thought I had to exterminate. I am fortunate to have a support system that challenges these systems of exclusion because it gives importance and agency to Black spatial investigations. To be selected as the winner of this year’s Wheelwright Prize provides credibility that Blackness is a viable and critical discourse, and strengthens my resolve and confidence in my professional trajectory. My hope is that my win and the work that follows it will be a necessary accelerant to provide more opportunities and exposure to Black practitioners and researchers."
Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, congratulated Barnes on receiving the prize this year. "His focus on the classical origins of a familiar type—the porch—is both potently precise and generously speculative. Importantly, Barnes positions his research in terms of overlooked or underacknowledged connections and contributions, focusing upon a specific architectural question and, from there, suggesting a constellation of revelations. Barnes delivers the specificity, the technical skill, the innovation, and the passion that promise to make his project significant both for architecture as a discipline and for architectural culture writ large."
Barnes is also a 2021-2022 American Academy Rome Prize recipient and part of the Black Reconstruction Collective with its recent MoMA exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.
The 2021 Wheelwright Prize jury was composed of David Brown (Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture); David Hartt (Carrafiell Assistant Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design); Mark Lee (Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD); Megan Panzano (Assistant Professor of Architecture and Program Director of Undergraduate Architecture Studies at Harvard GSD); Sumayya Vally (Founder and Principal of Counterspace Studio); and Sarah M. Whiting (Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD).
The list of winning Wheelwright Prize proposals in recent years includes "Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation" by Daniel Fernández Pascual, "UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses" by Aleksandra Jaeschke, "Crafted Images: Material Flows, Techniques, and Uses in Set Design Construction" by Aude-Line Dulière, and "Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements" by Samuel Bravo, to name a few.
15 Comments
Congrats Germane! Well deserved.
For such a talented guy to have been rejected in all masters of architecture programs he applied to, points to a larger problem in society, architecture and architectural education; very disturbing. Schools have to reflect society;
the path to licensure also has to be delinked from internships by individual architects who unfortunately hire based on bias. Architecture can be a very subjective profession with devastating consequences to social good.
https://woodbury.edu/news/alum...
Schools don't have to reflect society at all, they simply need to accept talented applicants and need to do that without bias.
non-bias can produce randomized applicants/admits that reflect society from elementary to graduate school; any bias along the pipeline creates non-random outcomes in architecture school that do not reflect society.
If neighbor-hoods and public schools are non-randomized(https://www.brookings.edu/essa...)
architecture schools must play their part to create outcomes that reflect society but not exacerbate the already existing mistakes.
They are doing it in the military and you are not complaining when soldiers that reflect society defend your existence.
They are doing it in the medical field and you are not complaining when doctors that reflect society create treatments for your existence including the recent breakthroughs in pandemic treatments;
Just like medical schools(https://www.npr.org/sections/h...)
architecture schools must make efforts to reflect society especially if they are publicly funded; Everyone buys homes so everyone should get a fair chance to attend architecture school.
The gentleman above(https://woodbury.edu/news/alum...)
and others possibly did not get that and still don't.
(https://thethinkingarchitect.w...)
(https://arch.usc.edu/diversity...)
"architecture schools must play their part to create outcomes that reflect society"
No they don't have to, why? I wouldn't want to be selected by a school simply because of my skin colour, my sex or sexuality...nor would I want to be refused because of those criteria.
MIT(1868);Cornell(1871);University of Illinois(1873) and other architecture schools were precisely doing that for over 100 years
(https://newrepublic.com/articl...)
so now they are just required to select students randomly by correcting biased past outcomes that were non-randomized and therefore did not reflect society; simple science;
and the result is that the schools can reflect society; the social benefits of which typically outweighs the social costs;
Just like you pay taxes that go to fund public schools which reflect society.The benefits of having access to education outweigh the costs to society.
(https://www.publicschoolreview...)
Randomized equal opportunity from elementary school to high school typically produces Randomized outcomes in higher education including architectural education;
the unintended consequences is that the schools then reflect society; when the end product does not show this outcome or something similar ,society retraces back its steps to evaluate and correct potential missteps.
Maybe you can reach out to the gentleman above and ask him about his experiences then you'll understand.
Your personal preferences might be good for you but not good for the society. You might prefer to walk naked in public but it might not be good for society because we have to protect minors also from you.
All the kindergarten teachers and elementary school teachers my kids ever seen are female, all the plumbers and garbage men men. should we socially engineer there too or only in the fields of your choosing to get the results and outcomes that you accept? Should we therefore deny perfectly capable Asians a spot in university because they are over-represented demographically (just assuming, didn’t look up any numbers)in certain fields of study? And what about people of mixed heritage or people who identify as a minority but maybe aren’t? Should they qualify according to your proposed policies? I know it can be difficult for some to get a seat at the table, but selection of who gets a seat based on racial criteria instead of what they bring to the table, isn’t that what we should be fighting? I don’t know if that’s the way to go...that is a slippery slope.
no one is "engineering" anything, but i find it strange to be opposed to encouraging more men to teach, for example.
papd,
For you, a column [in Dutch newspaper NRC, found via LinkedIn], by Robbert Dijkgraaf [director Institute for Advanced Study] about the identity culture in universities:
"We must be careful to put the personal background in the foreground too much and to see identity as a predestination," he writes.
"Diversity is high on the social agenda, also within science. And rightly so. One of the positive developments of recent years is the growing understanding that science must be accessible to everyone, regardless of ethnicity, skin colour, gender, faith or – the most difficult of all – social class.
More diversity naturally makes research better. It brings new talent and the different viewpoints reflect the many facets of reality.
But sometimes I get a little disdaught from increasing thinking in terms of origin, rather than destination. Especially here in the United States. Everyone – politicians, voters, students, consumers – is placed in the white, black, Latino or Asian box.
At the same time, the intellectual bandwidth seems to be shrinking. Within the academy, the toes are getting longer and longer[=people getting easier offended, as having long toes means people step on them easier] freethinking is under pressure and the thought police are around."
You are talking about your own things; and have little understanding of society. Completely off topic. Please contact the gentleman and ask him about his experiences and those of others.
By the way in most school districts especially public schools; anyone has an equal chance of being a kindergarten teacher; and there are benefits to having workforce that reflects society in kindergarten too!
(https://www.marianuniversity.e...)
The gentleman above did not get that for architecture school; and there is a history behind it; especially in architecture.
"By the way in most school districts especially public schools; anyone has an equal chance of being a kindergarten teacher; and there are benefits to having workforce that reflects society in kindergarten too! "
But 99.9% of kindergarten teachers is female, while society is 50% male! And that is totally fine by me, as long as they do their job...I just hope there is no institutional bias against male kindergarten teachers that they are denied a job or spot at kindergarten teaching school.
If we do go obsess over demographics and percentages than should an architecture school reflect society demographically or should it reflect the demographics of the (successful?) applicants? If there are just much less applicants from a certain demographic, that should be visible in the make-up of a school, shouldn't it? Or do you propose to fake it to keep up appearances?
I don't think any good applicant should be sent away just because of their demographic and I don't think any bad applicant should be accepted because of their demographic.
"99.9% of Kindergarten teachers are female"; can you please give us a break-down of other demographic indicators of this group
what for?
None of these comments really react to winning research agenda at all...What do folks think? To me the idea of examining "Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors" or focusing "on the classical origins of a familiar type—the porch" both sound fascinating and a unique way to complicate traditional "Western" canon. Wonder what the fashy/revivalists would think!
yes, not shocked at all that a positive, celebratory news post was narcissisticly turned into an opportunistic grieving session.
i saw barnes's work @ moma and was very impressed- excited to see what will come out of this research.
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