The winner of the Graham Foundation's 2015 Carter Manny Award for doctoral dissertation writing and a $20,000 award is Vanessa Grossman, a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Vanessa’s dissertation, "A Concrete Alliance: Modernism, Communism, and the Design of Urban France, 1958–1981," unveils the powerful coalition that formed in the postwar era between architects and the French Communist Party and served as a crucial agent in the massive reshaping of French cities. Through four case studies, Vanessa’s thesis unveils how through their contributions to the spatial shaping of the French communist project and their early engagement with urban issues, architects were among the first to confront shifting trends in urbanization, to appropriate French urban sociology, and to anticipate the crisis that the modern city would experience beginning in the 1960s.
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts makes project-based grants to individuals and organizations and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.
The Carter Manny Award supports dissertation research and writing by promising scholars whose projects have architecture as their primary focus and the potential to shape architectural discourse. Projects may be drawn from the various fields of inquiry supported by the Graham Foundation: architectural history, theory, and criticism; design; engineering; landscape architecture; urban planning; urban studies; visual arts; and other related fields. (See the Overview of our grant programs). The award assists students enrolled in graduate programs in architecture, art history, the fine arts, humanities, and the social sciences working on architecture topics. For more information about the Carter Manny Award visit the Graham Foundation Website.
