Branner + Stump Returning Fellows | Architecture Exhibition
Exhibition Hours: 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
Reception: Monday, February 10 | 6–7:30 p.m.
The John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship and Harold Stump Memorial Traveling Fellowship are prizes for international travel and research awarded annually to Master of Architecture students. The Branner and Stump Returning Fellows Exhibition surveys the experiences and findings of 2024-25 fellowship recipients after their international travels.

Sascha Fawaz (MArch 2025)
Architecture of Coexistence: Dissecting the Layers of Multifaceted Homes
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
Lebanon’s architectural narrative bears the imprints of diverse foreign influences, spanning the Roman era, the Ottoman Empire, and the French mandate. Consequently, the traditional Lebanese house emerged as a synthesis of various cultures etching their narratives onto the prototype of habitation.
This undertaking aims to dissect, unpack, or deconstruct the manifold elements and layers embedded in that architectural emblem, examining how a singular house can unfurl into a multitude of residences, or how numerous homes can coexist within one.
The exploration delves into comprehending the layers and intricacies by drawing parallels, seeking to return to the origins of each foreign influence on the house. In essence, the objective is to trace each architectural element back to its country of origin, offering and sharing a profound understanding of the house’s levels and complexity. By traveling to France (Paris), Italy (Florence/Venice), and Turkey (Istanbul), Fawaz aspires to explore specific locales that have significantly shaped the traditional Lebanese house.

Quinton Heath Frederick (MArch 2025)
Material Out of Place: Landscapes of Post-Flood Recovery
Harold Stump Memorial Travel Fellow
One out of four people in the world currently live in a floodplain. The recent increase in frequency and severity of flooding suggests a large-scale reorganization of the global material landscape. This project examines material conditions from sites of recent flooding in Japan, Greece and France to study the implications and opportunities of anthropocentric flooding. Using Douglas’ definition of waste as “matter out of place,” reuse and repair strategies are proposed which preserve valued building fragments and improve outcomes in future floods. The work is informed by historic and contemporary examples of flood resilience visited in Thailand, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.

Cing Lu (MArch 2025)
Building from Fragments — Another Perspective on the Architectural Mock-Up
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
The architectural mock-up — defined as a fragment created to simulate the visual effect of a building or test its technical viability — has an established place in design practice. However, can we envision making something else of these fragments? Our conventional way of looking at them is grounded in seeing the whole from a part — a legacy of the design profession’s obsession with “wholeness.”
This travel research explores the proposition of “metonym” that we might think our way out of this box by fundamentally reconsidering the mock-up’s creation and potential contribution. Could it function as a standalone object or be recombined in unorthodox ways? Could it become a component of architecture’s language as a poetic particle as well as in a complete sentence?
To investigate these possibilities, I have studied existing mock-ups at construction sites, laboratories, and design firms across the US, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and China. Reinterpreting these intriguing yet transient fragments might be the key to a new architectural expression.

Alicia Moreira (MArch 2021)
Territorial Tendencies: Constructing Alpine River Portraits
John K. Branner Travel Fellow and Andrew Beckerman Travel Fellow
The proliferating commodification and privatization of water has led to the urbanization of even the most remote reaches of the planet. As an inquiry into the ways in which architecture engages with geography across layers of territory and emerging types of urbanization, this project composes portraits of three Alpine rivers — the Po, Rhone, and Rhine. Moments of extraction, tourism, resilience, and adaptation documented along the course of each river, traced by bike and train from source to mouth, are cast onto installations of a green-screen assembly at each river’s source. Films of each staged installation serve to conflate the entirety of each river into its ostensibly untouched and natural source, provoking questions of water property and the role of architecture in an ever-changing climate. The research reflects an extended and continued meditation and evolution of the subject over summers shaped by COVID-19, political unrest, travel and documentation, and physical installations.

Elizabeth Rechin (MArch 2025)
The Space Between Sanctities: Exploring Architecturally Adapted Religious Spaces
John K. Branner Travel Fellow
While cultural and religious practices may be in flux in a particular region over time, the architectural foundations of sacred spaces often remain the same. These cultural fluctuations and shifts often prompt necessary adaptations to architectural spaces, creating spaces with layered architectural history and memory.
This project examines transformations of sacred spaces across three categories: religious spaces transitioning between religions, spaces shifting from worship to entirely new programs, and sacred spaces undergoing changes in ownership. By exploring these transitions, the research investigates how movement, time, and change layer to create embedded architectural and cultural memory within these structures. It highlights the tension between preservation and adaptation, asking what is retained, demolished, or concealed as sacred spaces transform.
This research investigates how communities can move through a singular space over time, imposing various programs, cultures, and uses within the same structure, and how we can tend to our existing structures and building materials to accommodate these shifting paradigms.
The transformation of a sacred structure to another program typology prompts a dichotomy between preservation of culture and architectural adaptation. What is preserved, what is demolished, and what is covered up become pivotal studies in a structure’s new context; discovering how and if the sanctity of space is preserved, and what is replacing it, tangible or intangible. This project explores how different cultures have adapted the architecture of sacred space in order to accommodate different scales of change, uncovering the architectural shifts and misalignments that have occurred in order to facilitate that change.
Free and open to the public.
The Branner + Stump Returning Fellows Exhibition is on view Monday, February 3–Thursday February 13, 2025, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, contact Monica Renner at least 10 days in advance.