Topics

2024–2025
Advancing Toward a Water-Secure Future

As shared during the United Nations 2023 Water Conference, two billion people lack access to safe drinking water; 40 percent of the world’s population is affected by water scarcity; agriculture demands alone account for 70 percent of water usage; more than 90 percent of disasters are water-related; and pressure on freshwater is projected to increase by more than 40 percent by 2050.

From macro multinational ecosystems to microclimates, there is an urgent need for bold and collaborative solutions to a myriad of existing and future water-related challenges. This year, the SOM Foundation will direct its support toward proposals that address the complex relationship between water, people, and the built environment. Creating a sustainable, equitable, and water-secure future will require innovative and multidisciplinary ideas that shape long-term policies, define comprehensive plans, and identify immediate actions.

2023–2024
Adapting Housing Strategies to Respond to New Realities

This year’s topic seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs. These housing strategies need to consider changing demographics, collectivity, economy, work patterns, and the environment, through the exploration of design strategies, community engagement, economic models, and legal policies. With housing costs continuing to escalate and adequate housing remaining inaccessible for many in our communities, we need to think and build in a smart and sustainable way, update existing housing developments, and foster the adaptive reuse of other existing typologies to create thriving communities and healthy neighborhoods.

Projects

A Taxonomy of Vacancy: Are Underutilized Commercial Strips the Answer to San Antonio’s Housing Shortage?

Block by Block: Advancing New American Dreams and Housing Justice by Aligning Design with Zoning Reform

Open System for the Urban Regeneration of Housing Estates: A Case Study in Barcelona

Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface

Exploring Innovative Housing: A Playbook for Optimism

Vertical Deconstruction, Housing Equity, and Humanistic Care

Re-Inhabit the “Invisible Room”

Adapting Housing Strategies: Temporary Construction and Code Compliance

2022–2023
Shaping Our World Through Air

This year’s topic is a prompt to investigate the impact that air has on our world, from the unequal way pollution affects communities to the way it shapes spatial conditions and material innovations. How can air be considered while exploring new architectural environments, structural solutions, ecological strategies, and urban policies? According to the World Health Organization’s 2022 air quality database, 99 percent of the world’s population breathes polluted air that exceeds internationally approved limits. Within this context, what are the multidisciplinary approaches that can develop a more sustainable future? How can air, a vital element that belongs to none, benefit all? Air shapes our world and knows no boundaries.

Projects

Collective Comfort: Framing the Cooling Center as a Resiliency and Educational Hub for Communities in Desert Cities

Taking Back the Air: Collective Learning, Advocacy, and Design for a Healthy Environment

Air de jeux: Protecting Children from Air Pollution by Designing Urban Environmental Installations

Structures that Breathe

Air Purification and Urban Strategies

Air Justice: A Study on the Relationship Between Urban Form, Social Class, and Air Quality

Environmental Tectonics Through Air: Learning from Vernacular

2021–2022
Envisioning Responsible Relationships with Materiality

According to a United Nations Environment Programme report published in 2020, “natural resource extraction and processing still account for more than 90 percent of global biodiversity loss and water stress, and around half of global greenhouse gas emissions.” In a context of global environmental crisis and enduring resource inequality, it is essential to continue to reevaluate our relationship with materiality.

This year’s topic seeks to explore materiality from the micro- to the macroscale, bringing together designers and researchers from multiple disciplines in order to envision sustainable, responsible, and ethical relationships with materials and the communities that they come from. How do we shape nonexploitative networks of extraction, production, distribution, and waste? What type of social, cultural, and environmental landscapes do those new networks define? What are the roles and responsibilities of nations, corporations, communities, and individuals in shaping these networks? What are ways to limit the long-term impact on Earth of the human consumption of materials? And what material innovations—technical or in their application—present new possibilities?

Projects

MycoKnit: Cultivating Mycelium-Based Composites on Knitted Textiles for Large-Scale Biodegradable Architectural Structures

Soil Sisters: An Intersectoral Material Design Framework for Soil Health

Constructive Land

An Ontological Study of Structures and Their Materiality

2020–2021
Examining Social Justice in Urban Contexts

The built environment is defined by human-made decisions that have long-lasting impacts on our society. Today, we are in the midst of a critical conversation about how structural racial injustices, discriminatory policies, and uneven access to resources have shaped our society and our built environment for decades. Challenges like the current global health crisis reveal and amplify conditions that have always been present. These injustices and policies are manifested in both subtle and explicit ways across many areas—from housing, education, economy, and safety to public transportation, public space, health, and the environment. Governments, civic institutions, private organizations, professionals, and citizens continuously define, respond, and contest these conditions. Exploring and identifying long-term policies, immediate actions, and comprehensive plans have the potential to shape a more equitable and sustainable future.

Projects

Reclaiming Black Settlements: A Design Playbook for Historic Communities in the Shadow of Sprawl

Public Space and Scrutiny: Examining Urban Monuments through Social Psychology

Decolonizing Urban Landscapes: Reclaiming a Black and Indigenous Right to the City through Structural Design

Examining Social Justice Beneath the Surface: Taking European Public Swimming Pools as a Clue

Emotional Justice: Emotional Design of Urban Public Space

Spatial Reproduction in Industrial Areas: Study on Chinese Workers’ Spatial Production in Europe

2019–2020
Shrinking Our Agricultural Footprint

According to the World Resources Institute, agriculture currently uses almost half of the world’s vegetated land, and agriculture and related land-use change generate one-quarter of the earth’s annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If we consider that the world population is expected to reach almost 10 billion by 2050, the need to think about how to increase food production in a sustainable and inclusive way while managing and reducing our agricultural footprint is a key global issue. But food is not the only outcome of agriculture. For example, biofuels, plastics, starch, and fibers can all be non-food products with an agricultural origin. Spatially, while people continue to concentrate in cities, the agricultural footprint required to serve their needs extends beyond the city limits into the hinterlands. This footprint has a direct impact on multiple systems, from the economy and transportation infrastructures to climate change, natural habitats, and wildlife biodiversity. The reduction of our agricultural footprint through policies, actions, and plans has the potential to redefine a more sustainable short- and long-term future.

Projects

The Right to Sewage: Digesting Mexico City in the Mezquital Valley

Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes

2018–2019
Humanizing High Density

Humanity is undergoing the greatest mass migration in history as people across the world move into urban areas. There has been significant effort to draw attention to the estimates that as of 2009 more than half the world’s population lived in cities. This number is expected to rise to nearly 70% in approximately the next 30 years. According to a 2014 United Nations Study, 1 in 4 people live in a city of over 1 million people and importantly, nearly 1 in 8 (453 million people) live in one of 28 megacities with populations of over 10 million. The result has been a global demand for high-density structures and urban environments that support places to live, to work and to socialize.

Projects

Architectural Standards Guide from a Neurological Perspective

Natural Light and Health in Urban Environments

A Case Study of the Cities of Japan

High-Density Habitation: Urban Planning and Residential Building

The Influence of Megastructure Buildings on European Urban Space

The Urban Error System: Evoking Spatial Redundancy/Residue