Faculty members receive research awards to advance work in architectural history

Architecture professor Charles L. Davis is co-author of Race and Modern Architecture. He recently received a research and publication award for the book, a collection of 17 essays on the role of race in modern architecture. Photo courtesy of the Graham Foundation.

Architecture professor Charles L. Davis is co-author of Race and Modern Architecture. He recently received a research and publication award for the book, a collection of 17 essays on the role of race in modern architecture. Photo courtesy of the Graham Foundation

By Rachel Teaman

Published July 10, 2017 This content is archived.

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Architecture professors Despina Stratigakos and Charles Davis have both received research awards from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to advance critical work in architectural history.

Davis, an alumnus of our program, former member of the Dean’s Council and now a faculty member in architecture, received funding to advance his research on racial theory and the architecture of modernity.

His publication, Race and Modern Architecture, co-authored with Irene Cheng and Mabel O. Wilson, presents a collection of seventeen groundbreaking essays by distinguished scholars writing on the critical role of racial theory in shaping architectural discourse, from the Enlightenment to the present. The book grows out of a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-year research project to redress longstanding neglect of racial discourses among architectural scholars.

Stratigakos’ grant will further her research on Hitler’ Nazi building programs in Norway, scholarship she is currently pursuing at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Hitler's Northern Dream: Building an Empire in Occupied Norway examines the Nazi's massive construction schemes undertaken in Norway and what they reveal about the National Socialist vision of colonial territories in the postwar world they imagined.

Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts makes project-based grants to individuals and organizations and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.