Gia Wolff awarded the 2013 Wheelwright Prize

Brooklyn-based architect Gia Wolff has been announced as the winner of the inaugural Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 two-year traveling fellowship dedicated to fostering new forms of architectural research informed by cross-cultural engagement, awarded by the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Wolff, a 35-year-old architect that has worked for Acconci Studio, LOT-EK, Adjaye Associates, and Architecture Research Office (ARO), is presently an assistant professor adjunct at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union and a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute. She leads her own practice, which focuses on “performance and its use of space and objects to convey narrative, form, and emotion,” in her words. Recently, Wolff has been collaborating with the Phantom Limb Company on set designs for several productions. She received a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD in 2008 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2001.

Wolff’s winning proposal, Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, proposes the study of the tradition of parade floats — elaborate temporary and mobile constructions that are realized annually in carnival festivals in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Goa (India), Nice (France), Santa Cruze de Tenerife (Spain), and Viarreggio (Italy). As Wolff describes in her essay, “The float transforms the city. Its scale makes exterior streets into interior rooms of street theater… This research ties into contemporary interests in performance and architectural notions of mobility, temporality, spectacle, urban space, and community-based design.”

The jury was enthusiastic about the strong continuity between Wolff’s existing body of work and her proposed area of study, stating how with “her interest in the community-based creative production of carnival floats, Wolff’s proposal has a social dimension that resonates with the current preoccupation with local fabrication and maker economies”.

The Wheelwright Prize jury — Mohsen Mostafavi, Yung Ho Chang, Farès el-Dahdah, K. Michael Hays, Farshid Moussavi, Zoe Ryan, and Jorge Silvetti — selected Gia Wolff from among 231 applicants from 45 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Burkina Faso, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, and Spain. Applicants were asked to submit portfolios along with a research proposal and travel itinerary, outlining an extended field investigation and its anticipated benefits for the field of architecture.

The new Wheelwright Prize is an update of the Arthur Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established in 1935 and previously available only to GSD alumni. The original prize was conceived at a time when few architects traveled abroad, and for many early recipients — including Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, William Wurster, and I. M. Pei — the fellowship financed travels that followed the tradition of the Grand European Tour. Under Dean Mostafavi, the GSD opened the prize to architects practicing anywhere in the world, recognizing the increasingly fluid flow of ideas and talent across the globe today, and the necessity of diverse forms of architectural research to developing new modes of practice.