News

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the topic for 2024–2025. This year’s awards will focus on the topic of “Advancing Toward a Water-Secure Future.”

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 SOM Foundation China Fellowship. Zhangxiang Dai, Wenxiao Xiang, and Xiangqing Zheng will each receive $5,000 to conduct independent travel and research. This year’s topic, “Adapting Housing Strategies to Respond to New Realities,” seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs.

On Saturday, July 20, Maya Livio, recipient of the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence, will lead a conversation with artist Huntrezz Janos and writer and researcher Emma Kemp as part of her research project “Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.”

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce that Black Spectacles will now support Robert L. Wesley Award recipients as they work toward becoming licensed architects. Each year, Black Spectacles will offer two year-long, Expert-level subscriptions that will provide students with online tools to study for the Architect Registration Examination (ARE). Robert L. Wesley Award recipients can claim this resource within five years of receiving the award.

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Structural Engineering Fellowship. Elizabeth Claypool will receive $20,000 to conduct original research. This year’s topic, “Adapting Housing Strategies to Respond to New Realities,” seeks to explore affordable, equitable, and innovative modes of multifamily housing that respond to current and future needs. With her proposal, “Exploring Innovative Housing: A Playbook for Optimism” Claypool aims to create a playbook for optimism: a survey of nineteen case studies to identify innovative solutions that create meaningful impacts on housing outcomes.

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of the 2024 China Fellowship. The $5,000 China Fellowship is awarded annually to three students in the last two years of either an undergraduate or graduate program in architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, or urban design in the People’s Republic of China to conduct independent travel and research that contributes to the SOM Foundation’s current topic, “Adapting Housing Strategies to Respond to New Realities.” The China Fellowship was created in 2006 to support emerging design leaders to broaden their education and contribute to their future professional and academic careers.

The SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture are pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Researcher-in-Residence. Maya Livio is an interdisciplinary curator, writer, scholar, and media artist, as well as Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University. Livio will receive a $5,000 stipend and an eight-week summer residency in the live/work space at R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles for work related to her research proposal entitled “Hospes: Housing Justice and Multispecies Cohabitation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.”

On Wednesday, June 5 at 5 pm EDT, the SOM Foundation is organizing a fellows reception coinciding with the AIA Conference on Architecture 2024.