The SOM Foundation supports individuals with the highest aspirations to enhance the design of the built environment.
Hao Chang
Reclaiming the Negative Space. © Hao Chang.
Lu Ming
Axonometric drawing of the inner part of the city wall in the waterfront area. © Lu Ming.
Zhang Nan
Scene of the transformation of the space under the viaduct in the Discover Eco-corridors project. © Zhang Nan.
Miro’s Chicago, Chicago, 1981. Photograph by Hedrich Blessing Photographers. © Successió Miró / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris 2025.
Pablo Castillo Luna
A Tent for Lovers, A Garden for Pollinators, 2022. © Pablo Castillo Luna.
Rebecca Henig
Coral Rubble at Moore Reef after MARRS star installation. Courtesy of Mars Incorporated and GBR Biology.
Aurélie Frolet
Jillian Maxcy-Brown
Emily McGlohn
The Rural Studio cluster system demonstration site is in Newbern, a rural Black Belt Alabama town. © Tim Hursley.
Dingliang Yang
Jennifer Yoos
Maura Rockcastle
Ross Altheimer
Roger Cummings
Daniel Carlson
Changó Cummings
Mapping of the “Soft-Urban Riverfront” along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, highlighting Pig’s Eye as a crucial site with a history of pollution, rich Indigenous heritage, and ecological significance. © Dingliang Yang and Michael Keller.
Map of Clew Bay in County Mayo. © Helen McFadden.
Steve Larkin
Helen McFadden
“Glitched Systems” is a product of manipulating established architectural works, reinterpreted through the theme of “glitch.” © Ferras Coulibaly.
Kalamazoo Post Office Branch. © Erin Kurtycz.
Treehouse—Consequences of Your Actions. © Beni Lawson.
“Framing Mobility Through Space.” © Salma Rodriguez.
The SOM Foundation supports individuals with the highest aspirations to enhance the design of the built environment.
Call for Applications
Research Prize Applications Open in September 2025
European Research Prize Applications Open in September 2025
Robert L. Wesley Award Applications Open in September 2025
2021 Structural Engineering Fellowship
Michelle Chang
University of Washington
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Église du Précieux Sang (Precious Blood Church), Winnipeg, Canada. © Michelle Chang.
Bunjil Place, Narre Warren, Australia. © Michelle Chang.
The second International Research and Design Forum took place on Friday, October 14 and Saturday, October 15, 2022, and was organized by the SOM Foundation in partnership with the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC) at the University of Stuttgart. The two-day event included presentations by academics and industry leaders whose body of work, creativity, and expertise inspire the future of materiality in the built world. Read
The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 SOM Foundation China Fellowship. Hao Chang, Lu Ming, and Zhang Nan will each receive $5,000 to conduct independent travel and research that contributes to this year’s topic, “Advancing Toward a Water-Secure Future.”
Spanish artist Joan Miró’s first large-scale public sculpture was commissioned in the early 1960s by Bruce Graham as part of his design for the Brunswick Building in Chicago. While the building was completed in 1965, Miró’s work remained unrealized, and its future seemed more than uncertain. Fifteen years later, plans for Miro’s Chicago were revived and, in 1981, the now-beloved abstract sculpture finally found her rightful place in Chicago, supported in part by a donation from the SOM Foundation.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture and the SOM Foundation are pleased to announce that Pablo Castillo Luna has been awarded the 2025 Researcher-in-Residence. Pablo Castillo Luna is a Canary Islands-born architect and educator who teaches at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Castillo Luna will receive a $5,000 stipend and a six-week summer residency in Los Angeles in the live/work space at the MAK Center’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House designed by R.M. Schindler (1936) for work related to his research proposal, “A Permeable Atlas.”