Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce four shortlisted architects for the 2024 Wheelwright Prize: Meriem Chabani, Nathan Friedman, Thandi Loewenson, and Ryan Roark. The Wheelwright Prize is an international competition for early-career architects.
Winners receive a $100,000 fellowship to foster innovative architectural research that is informed by cross-cultural engagement and can make a significant impact on architectural discourse. Winning research proposal topics in recent years have included the environmental and social impacts of sand mining; the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge; and new paradigms for digital infrastructure.
The 2024 Wheelwright Prize drew a wide pool of international applicants. A winner will be announced later in June.
Jurors for the 2024 prize include: Chris Cornelius professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning; K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and co-director of the Master in Design Studies program at the GSD; Jennifer Newsom, co-founder of Dream the Combine and assistant professor at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; John Peterson, Curator of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard GSD; Noura Al-Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.
The shortlisted architects are:
Meriem Chabani
Algeria-born, Paris-based Chabani is the founder and principal of NEW SOUTH
, an award-winning architecture, urban planning, and anthropology practice prioritizing spaces for vulnerable bodies in contested territories. Her work on complex sites includes the Taungdwingyi cultural center in Myanmar, the Globe Aroma refugee art center in Brussels, and the upcoming Mosque Zero in Paris. She currently teaches at ENSA Paris Malaquais and the Royal College of Arts. In 2020 Chabani won the Europe 40 under 40 award. She is a recipient of the Graham Foundation Grant and was named one of the leading young female architects in France by AMC in 2023.
Chabani’s proposal is titled “On Sacred Grounds: Sanctuaries in the Secularocene.”
Nathan Friedman
Friedman is co-founder of the Mexico City–based design office Departamento del Distrito
and a Professor in the Practice at the Rice University School of Architecture. His office was an official contributor to the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial and received the 2022 Architectural League of New York Prize, recognized for a diverse body of work that operates at the intersection of politics, identity, and the built environment. Friedman holds an MS from the Department of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT and a BArch from Cornell University.
Friedman’s project is titled “Sovereign Systems: Resource Management in Latin America.”
Thandi Loewenson
Born in Harare, Loewenson
is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction, and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Loewenson engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists and architects to act on those provocations.
Loewenson’s proposal is titled “Black Papers: Beyond the Politics of Land, Towards African Policies of Earth & Air.”
Ryan Roark
Roark
, PhD, AIA, is an architect, writer, biochemist, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at IIT in Chicago, where her research focuses on radical adaptive reuse and its role in urban development. At IIT, she directs the second-year undergraduate studio, on housing, and runs a lab where she develops novel biomaterials for use in retrofits. Her writing on the history of preservation, reuse, and urbanism has been published in JSAH, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and the book Ruskin’s Ecologies, among other publications. She has previously taught at Georgia Tech and Rice. She has her MArch from Princeton and her PhD in Oncology from Cambridge University. Roark’s proposed project is titled “Biomaterial Protocols: From Waste to Walls.”
