Jingru (Cyan) Cheng Wins Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize

Fellowship to support Cheng’s research proposal, an examination of the critical role of sand in human communities and the built environment.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to name Jingru (Cyan) Cheng the winner of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research. Her project, Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift, focuses on the economic, cultural, and ecological impacts of sand mining and land reclamation. From airports to beaches and river basins to hydroelectric dams, sand is a humble material that has a fundamental role in the built environment and human communities. Supporting modern cities and modern life, sand is a key component of concrete, glass, asphalt roads, and artificial land. However, by dredging underwater systems and channels, sand mining erodes riverbanks and disrupts ecosystems. Colossal amounts of sand are mined and moved to shape one habitat while destroying another.

The Wheelwright Prize will fund two years of Cheng’s research and travel, including visits to airports in Singapore, beaches in Florida, rivers in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and rural immigrant communities in China. Investigating how sand is mined and used in these diverse sites, Cheng will conduct interviews with key stakeholders and research design decisions, procurement routes, contractual relations, financing, regulations, and policies. She also plans to develop educational and public programs, and a multi-media archive that will be open access and made available for the affected communities, activist groups, and associated researchers.

“The proposal of Tracing Sand is the convergence of my different lines of work so far, the teachings that made me an architect, and the life experiences that made me. I see architectural materiality as an active, tangible force driving and shaping long chains of consequences and dependencies. It draws surprising connections between sites, communities, and ecologies. Winning the Wheelwright Prize affirms that the questions I’m after are part of the larger quest of architecture today, at a time of intensified social injustice and ecological crisis,” Cheng says. “As a travel-based design research award, the Wheelwright cannot be more fitting for this rather audacious proposition: to follow sand is to trace architectural materiality through supply chains and ecosystems. It is to learn through embodied experiences the entangled flows of people, life forms, matter, and the built environment across scales. Understanding how interconnected and interdependent we all are is fundamental today. I believe architecture provides a material wayfinding through this almost incomprehensible entanglement—and offers possibilities to transform it.”

 “In his book The World in a Grain (2018), American-Canadian journalist Vince Beiser underscores why sand affects each and every one of us: ‘It is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live.’ Cyan Cheng’s Wheelwright proposal takes Beiser’s claim one step further: sand underpins our built environment, but also our global economy,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “Tracing together material evidence, technological expertise, labor practices, and corporate reach, Cheng’s study has breadth that makes it relevant to every community across the globe, and specificity that promises to reveal hitherto unknown repercussions of this fragile resource.”

Jurors for the 2023 prize include: Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; Mira Henry, design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture; Mark Lee, Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Jacob Reidel, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Enrique Walker, Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.

“Tracing Sand examines an increasingly ubiquitous material that is at the base of the production of land and architecture by following its sourcing and consumption, unveiling the increasing entanglement of matter and site, as well as the livelihoods affected by its extraction,” observes Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. “By dissecting the complexity of material supply chains and the complicity of architecture in the destruction of natural environments, Cyan’s research bridges opposing sites and actors, from extraction to consumption, local communities to stakeholders. Through a multi-media approach and an in-depth analysis of the guts of hypermodernity, the proposal aims towards a comprehensive shift in the value system of architecture.”

 Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to draw out latent relations across scales, confronting intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cheng received commendations from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020. She is also a 2022 Graham Foundation Grantee. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–22), the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others, and is included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cheng holds a PhD by Design and MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) from the Architectural Association (AA), and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015–17). She co-led the MA architectural design studio Politics of the Atmosphere (2019–22) and currently teaches an interdisciplinary module across all schools at the Royal College of Art in London.