Branner, Stump & Beckerman Returning Fellows Exhibition
The John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship, Harold Stump Memorial Traveling Fellowship, and Andrew Beckerman Travel Fellowship are prizes for international travel and research awarded annually to Master of Architecture students. The Branner, Stump & Beckerman Returning Fellows Exhibition surveys the experiences and findings of 2023 fellowship recipients after their international travels.
Join us for a reception with returning fellows and the CED community on Feb. 7.
RETURNING FELLOWS
EMMANUEL CARRILLO (MArch 2024)
John K. Branner Travel Fellow and Andrew Beckerman Travel Fellow
Places of Worship, Spaces Reimagined: Religious Commoning through Architectural Reuse
Immigration, perhaps the defining characteristic of the contemporary city, is a process of rearticulation. Identities, economic conditions, and material realities are each reinterpreted as immigration simultaneously transforms individuals and their new cities. Though often overlooked, religious spaces provide a rich environment through which the process of immigration unfolds. The role which religion plays both personally to people who’ve immigrated and out in the built environment is constantly shifting and redefining the relationship between the two. Growing out of old storefronts, houses, workshops, and even parking garages, religious spaces quietly transform the leftover parts of the city. They serve the varied needs placed upon them by their community members while navigating the realities set by their local governments. By compiling photos and stories of spaces which depict immigrant narratives, this research project aims to show the value which religious architecture provides to both immigrant communities and their respective cities.
JONATHAN COLES (MArch 2024)
Harold Stump Memorial Travel Fellow
Unamerican Housing
New housing in the US is devastatingly pinned at the opposing extremes of single family sprawl and double-loaded corridors. These typologies are clear reflections of the nation’s values, being significantly derived from the overlap of stoic codes, relentless profiteering, and the logistics of bureaucracy. (Un)American Housing identifies and exploits loopholes in US building code, permitting, and development processes to propose several global housing models in an American context. Each proposition is a mashup of several organizational and tectonic strategies observed from standard typologies in Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Japan and Central and Western Europe. The project proposes that American housing can affordably achieve the benefits of foreign typologies by scrutinizing the logistical overlaps between our systems of value and governance.
YIBO LIN (MArch 2024)
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
Image City
City has struck the 21st century as constant-proliferating data of colors, pixels, and sensations. In the words of Kevin A. Lynch, city has become equivalent as a series of images residing in the mind of the people who experience it. City transcends its physical being as places of residence, establishing itself as a visual symbol under perpetual reconfiguration.
From waiting for the spontaneous staging of unexpected events, we seek to reassemble City as a series of images. Under the objective lens of a camera, can impressions of cities be rendered anew?
LUCINE LU (MArch 2024)
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
Archi-Therapy: Architecture Cures Depression
Among the top 10 most common chronic diseases, depression is the only mental illness. Compared with others such as stroke, cancer, and diabetes, curing depression requires medication and physical treatment. The physical treatment cycle could be extremely long; some treatments may last more than a decade or even a lifetime. Humans spend more than half their lifetime inside buildings and are surrounded by architecture daily. Why can’t architecture have a function to cure chronic illnesses, similar to long-term physical treatments? If architecture can heal people and bring positive experiences, what essential elements and considerations should we take into account during the planning process?
This study includes sites selected from countries with the highest depression rates, the highest suicide rates, and the highest positive experiences. The research aims to analyze the architecture, objects, weather, humanities, and social order of these countries in relation to depression and positive experiences. The goal is to understand the need for healing architecture and the elements that may contribute to depression.
AL OLIVA (MArch 2024)
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
Test Tiles: On Tile as a Generative Urban Artifact
Ceramic tile has remained relatively unmodified for milenia, enduring cross-culturally as a construction material for its highly resistant nature and ease of maintenance. But tile is as regional as it is universal, which suggests that ceramic tile is a valuable building block for experimentation despite its standardization as a unit. For instance, tile may work to process particulate matter in the name of a more sustainable future, or it may serve to reclaim surfaces, providing new highly graphic contributions to the urban setting. Alternatively, tile can serve as a palimpsest of histories otherwise forgotten, demonstrating it can measure more than a planar dimension. This project examines quarries, manufacturing facilities, and surfaces in subways, bathrooms, plazas, and temples across the UK, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. A series of test tiles will be produced that seek to explore the technological, compositional, and social dimensions to tile and tiling; working to trace echoes of the past and remix residues of place.
ELLIOTT FRANCIS SURBER (MArch 2024)
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
Elevated Architecture
Lifted above land and sea, countless elevated communities have flourished for millenia. A manifestation of adaptation and resilience; a true evolution of design through ecological coexistence. This project evaluates contemporary and historical use of subtropical elevated architectural typologies through a methodology of urban acupuncture and the embrace of three fundamental principles/questions:
Acknowledgement of Wisdom
How have communities traditionally and historically designed systems and strategies to mitigate weather events, flooding, and sea level rise?
Interrelationship Through Design
How has the built environment been influenced by aquatic topology and ecology, and in what way has elevated architecture merged with the continuously changing morphology of landscapes and shoreline?
Resolution and Presence
What materials and technologies have been developed that hold the potential to actively adapt and respond to the ongoing global climate change?
Free and open to the public.
If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, contact Monica Renner at monicarenner@berkeley.edu or 510.219.5352 at least 10 days in advance.