Wheelwright Prize Lecture: Wheelwright Prize Jury with Germane Barnes

Event Description

In 2021, Germane Barnes was named the winner of the Wheelwright Prize, a grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture with an emphasis on globally-minded research. Barnes was among four remarkable finalists selected from more than 150 applicants hailing from 45 countries. With his winning project, Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, Barnes proposed to examine Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors, studying how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new architectural possibilities that emerge within investigations of Blackness. As with past Wheelwright winners, the prize funded two years of Barnes’s research and travel.

Following the opening of his first solo museum exhibition, Columnar Disorder, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 21, 2024 – January 27, 2025, Barnes will reflect on his research exploring the intersection of race, identity, and the built environment in conversation with the jury of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize.

The 2021 Wheelwright Prize jury includes: David Brown, Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago; David Hartt, Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania; Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Megan Panzano, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Program Director of Undergraduate Architecture Studies at Harvard GSD; Sumayya Vally, founder and principal of Counterspace Studio; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.

Participants

Germane Barnes is the Principal of Studio Barnes and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’ practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation.

His work has recently been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 2021 exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was selected for the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work has also been published in and acquired for the permanent collections of international institutions, most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture. His project, Griot, was widely published, as an installation in the Biennale Architettura 2023, Laboratory of the Future.

David Brown is an Architecture Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Brown works on The Available City, the potential of Chicago’s 10,000+ city-owned vacant lots as a community-driven collective space system, urban design, and future we can have today. Iterations of the speculative design have been exhibited in the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Brown was the Artistic Director of the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, which had The Available City as its focus and theme. His essays and drawings presenting the transformative impact The Available City can have on Chicago’s South and West Sides are found in CENTER 18: Music in Architecture—Architecture in Music, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 2, and Flat Out 4. Those essays continue his study of architecture and design in relation to structures in jazz that facilitate improvisation, which he initiated in the book Noise Orders (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Recently, Brown established The Available City as a non-profit organization. He is currently planning its inaugural effort in 2025.

David Hartt (b. 1967, Montréal) lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work explores how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Histories at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, A Colored Garden at The Glass House, Connecticut and the group exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is in several public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Cincinnati Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, The Jewish Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Canada, Nasher Museum of Art, RISD Museum, The Stedelijk Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hartt is a Pew Fellow, a Graham Foundation Fellow and a United States Artists Cruz Fellow. He is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant, and awards from Artadia and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. He is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, David Nolan Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte.

Mark Lee is Professor in Practice at the Harvard GSD. He is also a principal and founding partner of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 30 major awards. Mark has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich. He has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto.

Projects by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include the Menil Drawing Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago renovation, and the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California. The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Together with his partner Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee was the Artistic Director for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Megan Panzano is Lecturer in Architecture and Program Director of the Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies track along with the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s (GSD) public summer design programs. Over twelve years on faculty at Harvard GSD, Panzano has coordinated and taught award-winning introductory and advanced design studios and courses on representation and design education to students at both graduate and undergraduate levels. The design research and built work of her independent practice, studioPM, addresses architectures across scales that interplay images, objects, and space to prompt more progressive and diverse ways of seeing, knowing, and interacting with the world.  She is the recipient of a variety of honors for her design and pedagogical work, including an ACSA Faculty Design honor, a Best Parks award for her design of a perceptual playground for unscripted play, a solo exhibition of her project Architectural Artifacts at Boston’s pinkcomma gallery, a Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching “Spark” grant, three GSD Dean’s Junior Faculty Grants for original design research projects, and four sequential Harvard Excellence in Teaching awards. She has been published in The Journal of Architectural Education, Mark Magazine, Wallpaper*, Bauwelt, Architect, PLAT, Domus, The Boston Globe, The Harvard Gazette, and Harvard Design Magazine, and has exhibited internationally.

Sumayya Vally is the founder and principal of Counterspace, a design, research, and pedagogical entity. Vally’s work articulates the identities and landscapes of African and Islamic contexts, both rooted and diasporic. Recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and listed in the TIME100 Next, she has been named as a force poised to redefine architectural practice and canon.

Her pioneering spirit has earned her accolades such as Dezeen Awards’ Emerging Architect of the Year and one of Financial Times Readers’ Women of the Year in 2023. Vally was the youngest architect ever commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London, which opened to critical acclaim. Her role as the artistic director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah marked a pivotal moment in reimagining the definition of Islamic art. Her innovative approach, rooted in decolonial principles and grounded in the lived experiences of the Islamic world, has earned widespread acclaim and praise for its bold reinterpretation of traditional paradigms. Vally’s contributions to education and knowledge dissemination have been recognized with several honors, including an Honorary Professorship from UCL and a gold medal from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.

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