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Four faculty members and one alumna of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York have received Independent Projects grants from the New York State Council on the Arts in conjunction with the Architectural League of New York.

Each $10,000 award was granted for a self-generated year-long project in design practice and research that sought to answer the question of where design can go next. In the 2024 cycle, 25 proposals were selected out of 120 applications by a panel of 10 designers and educators.

The CCNY grant recipients are:

Assistant Professor and Master of Landscape Architecture Program Director Zihao Zhang, with Shurui Zhang, for Chinatown is Chinatown; Flushing is China: Defining Chinese Diasporic Urbanism in Emerging Chinatowns, which will document, analyze, and characterize “Chinese diasporic urbanism” by investigating two 21st-century emerging “Chinatowns” in Flushing and Long Island City, Queens;

Distinguished Lecturer Cassim Shepard, with Carsten Rodin, for Self-Help Housing: An Atlas of Agency, an online, interactive documentary project that maps a diverse series of late 20th-century architectural and urban development schemes that sought to activate the agency of residents to help solve their own housing challenges;

Adjunct Associate Professor Suzan Wines, with James Wines and Phillip Denny, for What Else Could It Mean? Writings and Drawings with James Wines, a book and video series featuring projects, drawings, lectures, and essays by the American architect and designer James Wines; and

Adjunct Associate Professor Kaja Kuehl for The Northeast Biobased Material Atlas, an investigation into the building sector and construction supply chain of the American Northeast.

In addition to the faculty winners, Christine Facella MLA ’17, an assistant professor of product and industrial design at the Parsons School of Design, received a grant for Warm, Fuzzy, Toxic: Milkweed Softgoods for the Nomadic New Yorker, a prototype bedroll created out of local and repurposed resources, including milkweed fiber and textile waste generated by New York City’s Garment District.

“This is Spitzer’s best showing in recent memory,” said Dean Marta Gutman. “Winning this grant is a huge honor, a very competitive process.”

More details on the project and the program are available here.

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Syd Steinhardt
212-650-7875
ssteinhardt1@ccny.cuny.edu