Yale School of Architecture scholars take home top honors at the 2023 Carter Manny Awards

Today, the Graham Foundation’s 2023 slate of Carter Manny Awards winners was revealed, recognizing the best new writing and research from within the architecture and design fields in what is now the Awards' 27th edition.

Two doctoral candidates in the History and Theory program at the Yale University, School of Architecture were selected for this year’s Carter Manny Writing Award and Carter Manny Research Award. Both are named in honor of the Foundation’s longtime director emeritus. The Graham Foundation says the Awards are meant to support work that "contributes to new narratives in contemporary understanding of architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society."

Aaron Tobey won the Writing Award for "Drawing Management: Corporate Organization, International Practice, and the Making of Computer Aided Design," which "recasts narratives of a momentous 'digital turn' led by self-consciously avant-garde architects to instead show a longer, less deliberate trajectory of computer use that highlights the contingency of present practices as well as the assumptions they carry with them." Tobey is currently a visiting assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

Tobey was joined by Jia Weng, whose dissertation "Environmental Conduits in China: Pipe Politics, Fluid Management, and the Rise of the Global Airscape" won the Research Award, offering an exploration into the development of heating and cooling considerations in 20th-century China across three exemplary "episodes."