Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced the six recipients of their 2018 Richard Rogers Fellowship program. Inspired by Lord Richard Rogers’ “commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation and engagement,” the Fellowship established last year to support individuals “whose research will be enhanced by access to London’s extraordinary institutions, libraries, practices, professionals, and other unique resources.”
The six winners will be given the opportunity to live and research at the Wimbledon House in London, which was designed by Rogers for his parents in the late 1960s. In 2015, Rogers gifted the home to Harvard for Fellowship use. This year’s winners will receive a three-month residency as well as travel expenses to London and $10,000 cash.
"From property guardianship to large-scale prototyping of urban environments, the diversity of subjects taken up by the 2018 cohort of fellows is extraordinary, and the way they propose to engage their projects with London is very exciting to see," commented Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of Harvard GSD and member of the Fellowship Selection Committee. "We look forward to the second year of this important program, and are eager to witness the consequences of this research."
Check out the winners and their project proposals below.
2018 Richard Rogers Fellows
Spring 2018 Fellows
Irina Davidovici (Zurich, Switzerland)
Housing as Urban Commons: Social Practices for Collective Dwelling
Davidovici will use her residency to conduct a comparative study of London co-housing schemes and Zurich housing cooperatives, viewed through the common criteria of citizen participation, self-governance, sustainability, and social inclusion. The topic is developed from an architectural perspective, focusing on the impact of communal living and participative processes on the design of innovative prototypes for collective housing.
Peter Buš (Zurich, Switzerland)
Large-scale Urban Prototyping for Responsive Urban Environments: Towards Distinctive and Customized Future Cities
Through the Richard Rogers Fellowship, Peter will investigate potentialities of computation, digital fabrication methods, and prototyping practices for their applications of construction deliveries in large-scale urban contexts and their capacities to respond to citizens' necessities. Within this scope, the research aims to reveal, examine, and define to what extent the return of workshop models through digital making is capable to deal with large quantities of bespoke productions, considering the current advancements in a building industry and fabrication technologies as well as a position of citizens in on-site participation.
Summer 2018 Fellows
Aleksandr Bierig (Cambridge, United States)
The Ashes of the City: Energy, Economy, and the London Coal Exchange
During the Richard Rogers Fellowship, Bierig will be advancing his dissertation research, exploring the architectural, infrastructural, and commercial regulations of the eighteenth-century coal trade, including documentation on coal taxation, records of debates on the London Coal Trade, and designs for metropolitan improvements. This work will take place at several archives and institutions, including the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives, and the British Museum.
Alexis Kalagas (Zurich, Switzerland)
Deflating the London Bubble: Non-Profit Housing Strategies
A decade on from the subprime crisis, Kalagas notes, cities worldwide are again contending with risky housing bubbles. During the fellowship, Kalagas intends to explore how alternative models of affordable housing could be adapted and scaled in places like London that are reckoning with this acute challenge. In particular, Kalagas is interested in whether non-speculative, rental-based developments could succeed in cities shaped by a persistent dream of homeownership, and take root in an overheated property market.
Fall 2018 Fellows
Kaz Yoneda (Tokyo, Japan)
Growing Pains: Comparative Analyses of Un/Fulfilled Potentials and Legacies of Two Olympiads
Yoneda's Richard Rogers Fellowship research will focus on the design protocols of mega-scale developments, and "Tokyoism," which he calls a projective manifesto for a city without one. His fellowship research takes a topical and critical look at the 2012 London Olympics, in comparison to Tokyo's forthcoming 2020 Olympics, to conduct analyses of its transparent process, innovation, and design evaluation. It is the greater ambition of this project to imagine what Tokyo could have become if its enabling system endowed much of what should have been learned from London.
Cathy Smith (Newcastle, Australia)
The Rise of the (Property) Guardians: Urban Tenure and Temporary Occupation in the Twenty-First Century City
Smith's interdisciplinary research will develop an ethical and theoretical framework for engaging with the emergent phenomenon of London "property guardianship," a term used to describe the sanctioned, temporary occupation of vacant commercial and residential buildings in Europe, North America and Australia. This research will focus on the stakeholder experiences of the London "model" of property guardianship by situating them in a broader international and critical scholarly context.
News and project descriptions via Harvard GSD.
Richard and Su Rogers's Wimbledon House Photographed by Iwan Baan
Following extensive renovations led by Philip Gumuchdjian and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, 'Wimbledon House'-formerly known as the Rogers House or '22 Parkside'-has reopened as the Harvard GSD's primary residence and London venue for the Richard Rogers Fellowship.
