Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Jingru (Cyan) Cheng as the recipient of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize, a study grant created to support globally-minded research and investigative approaches to contemporary architecture. The winning research project, titled “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” delves into the multifaceted impacts of sand mining and reclamation, understood from cultural, economic, and ecological perspectives. The unassuming material has become an indispensable element for our built environment and human communities, serving as a vital component in the production of glass, concrete, asphalt roads, and artificial land. Yet the process of dredging underwater systems and sand mining leads to the disruption of habitats in a process that simultaneously shapes one habitat while devastating another.
The prize will fund two years of research and travel to a range of locations, these include Singapore's airports, Florida's beaches, the rivers of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and rural immigrant communities in China. By examining the processes of sand mining and its utilization across these diverse sites, Cheng will engage in comprehensive interviews to explore an array of aspects, like analyzing design choices, tracing procurement routes, studying contractual relationships, understanding financing mechanisms, and assessing relevant regulations and policies. Cheng also aims to develop educational and public programs along with a multimedia archive to make the research accessible to affected communities, activist groups and fellow researchers.
The proposal of Tracing Sand is the convergence of my different lines of work so far, the teachings that made me an architect, and the life experiences that made me. I see architectural materiality as an active, tangible force driving and shaping long chains of consequences and dependencies. It draws surprising connections between sites, communities, and ecologies. Winning the Wheelwright Prize affirms that the questions I’m after are part of the larger quest of architecture today, at a time of intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. - Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
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Marina Otero Wins 2022 Wheelwright Prize with a Project Focused on Data Storage ArchitectureThrough a multi-media approach, Cheng’s research aims to bring an in-depth analysis of the material that came to define hypermodernity, striving to create a shift in the value system of architecture. By analyzing the complexity of material supply chains, it also highlights the complicity of architecture in the destruction of natural environments, unveiling an increasingly entangled story of building and degradation.
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng’s work spans architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking, drawing out relations between intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Her research project was selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants. Three other finalists have been commended by the jury: Isabel Abascal, Maya Bird-Murphy, and Dk Osseo-Asare for their promising research proposals.
Cheng follows 2022 Wheelwright Prize winner Marina Otero, whose research project, “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse,” examined the changing architecture paradigm of digital data storage. Through this project, Otero set out to investigate a largely neglected building typology with significant implications on land and energy consumption worldwide. The project is currently in its travel-research phase. In 2021, Germane Barnes was the recipient of the grant with a project titled Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture.
