News/Research

Nicholas de Monchaux & Neyran Turan Receive Graham Foundation Award

18 Apr, 2018

Nicholas de Monchaux & Neyran Turan Receive Graham Foundation Award

BCNM Director Nicholas de Monchaux and BCNM seed grant recipient Neyran Turan both received a 2018 grant from the Graham Foundation to fund their respective projects. Here are the descriptions of their grant-winning proposals:

Nicholas de Monchaux, "Rebel Plans: Apple, Star Wars, and Architecture At Bay"

California's Bay Area, at the margin of conventional architectural history, has been central to two self-fulfilling prophetic visions of our designed futures: Star Wars and Apple. These two juggernauts of technology, culture, and utopian thinking are linked not only by a coincidence of geography, but a hidden history and historiography in which the social and professional lives of George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and several of their key lieutenants are surprisingly and influentially intertwined. We are all nerds now. Star Wars and Apple reveal a great deal about why today's world—especially architecture and urbanism—looks and works the way it does. Their aesthetic and operational defaults and biases, and the social history behind them, illuminate a contemporary crisis between order and openness, between power and the distribution of power, that must be continually renegotiated as we make buildings, cities, and infrastructure at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Neyran Turan, "Architecture as Measure"

In light of our current political crisis around climate change, what can architecture contribute toward a new planetary imaginary of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Rather than limiting the role of climate change for design as a problem to solve, can we speculate on architecture as a measure against which the world might be read? This book elaborates on this question and the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. Architecture as Measure positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural imagination. It presents a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which speculate on the broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of architectural questions such as form, representation, and materiality. While collapsing the architectural discipline, these collisions call for an alternative environmental imagination that is enabled by such unconventional encounters and allow us to resituate architecture's engagement with the world through another kind of realism.

Visit the offical website for more information about the other 2018 grantees and the Graham Foundation itself.