Each year, the Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) Foundation sponsors a series of fellowships aimed at supporting emerging designers and advancing international research. The 2018 cycle included two Harvard University Graduate School of Design winners: Eduardo Martínez-Mediero Rubio (MArch ’19) was awarded one of three KPF Traveling Fellowships and Sonny Xu (MArch ’18, MLA ’18) received one of two KPF Paul Katz Fellowships.
Martínez-Mediero Rubio is using his $10,000 travel fund to further his research on the “Architecture of Greed,” which investigates residential architecture from the 1980s to the early 2000s through the lens of finance capitalism. “The KPF Traveling Fellowship is allowing me to visit many sites around the world that are pivotal in demonstrating the decline of our civic realm through the privatization of infrastructure and property,” says Martínez-Mediero Rubio. This summer he visited golf resorts in Southern Spain and suburban developments in Las Vegas. He plans to travel to China, Ireland, Mexico, Kazakhstan, and Russia in the coming months, and will apply his fellowship research towards his GSD thesis. Follow Martínez-Mediero Rubio’s travels on Instagram @_hanghar.
The 2018 Traveling Fellowship jury included Kiel Moe, associate professor of architecture and energy.
As a recipient of the KPF Paul Katz Fellowship, Xu is spending four months in Sydney, the focus city of this year’s grant. “This month and moving forward, I will be compiling and designing new hybrid typologies of infrastructure, landscape, and urban forms for Sydney though digital model and drawing explorations,” says Xu, who recently returned from six weeks in Australia and plans to be back in Sydney for more research in the coming months. His project approaches urbanism from multiple scales, drawing on his training as both an architect and a landscape architecture. Follow Xu’s travels on Instagram @sonnyxu and with #kpfpaulkatzfellowship.
This is the second year in a row that a GSD student has been award the KPF Paul Katz Fellowship. Carly Dickson (AB ’12, MArch ’17) received a 2017 grant for study in London, and Ruben Segovia (MArch ’17) received a KPF Paul Katz Fellowship Merit Award last year. The fellowship was established in 2016 to honor of the life and work of former KPF Principal Paul Katz.
