News

Q&A With the Spitzer Travel Grants Committee

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Time – 1:00 pm

Location – Sciame Auditorium

 

Join us, get your application, share ideas, and learn about other fellowships.

 

Thanks to the generosity of Bernard and Anne Spitzer, the architecture school offers three $5,000 travel fellowships each year to advanced students in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. The results have been no less than marvelous, as recipients have followed through on their proposals and adjusted them as they encounter new places! Such is the nature of fieldwork, properly done.

 

Michael Ong and Jamie Silvestro wanted to study historic preservation in Mexico City; they ended up designing a structure for water collection in the central market. Michael Luft-Weissberg came to appreciate how Cambodians have learned to live with water, as he tracked beautiful, ingenious, vernacular solutions—sadly threatened with destruction, not from water but from rapacious developers. When Steve Ramirez visited Medellin, Colombia, he learned that highly touted experiments in sustainable design are not all that they are cracked up to be. Diana Chang and Vladimir Schumovych recorded stunning Native American architecture at the Four Corners.

 

And perhaps the best news of all: Chiara DiPalma moved to Berlin to study informal use and development of public space along the former Berlin Wall. She intended to stay for a short while, but changed her plans when she found a job.

 

Note: For 2022, travel is permitted in the United States only (CUNY policy).