The Rice University School of Architecture is excited to announce that Associate Professor Troy Schaum and Assistant Professor Maggie Tsang are the inaugural recipients of a Rice Architecture Research Fellowship (ARF). This program, funded by the Office of Research and debuting with the 2024–25 academic year, provides a $30,000 research grant and teaching leave, giving faculty the time and space to focus on major scholarly projects.
These awards will support the architecture faculty as they continue to lead the way in research encompassing various forms of thinking, making, and discourse. The establishment of the ARF demonstrates Rice’s commitment to scholarly distinction by supporting the architecture faculty in tackling, holistically and imaginatively, the most pressing issues of our planet and to contributing to thriving urban communities.
Schaum’s research project, “Conservation Entanglements,” investigates how political entanglements and contradictions contribute to the design of buildings and cities and, particularly, how they contribute to the conservation and preservation of cultures, buildings, and communities. With a focus on Marfa and West Texas—or North America’s “Middle Landscape”—the project will result in a two-part international symposium and exhibition at the Chinati Foundation and Rice Architecture.
Referencing the seminal architecture text Learning from Las Vegas, Tsang’s proposal, “Learning from the Swamp,” examines the inscrutability of the swamp and its instrumentality to the urban and environmental history of the American South, where it has long functioned as an ecologically complex site offering alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and representing more-than-human relationships and worlds. The project will include articles, presentations, and, ultimately, a book-length study of swamps as a framework for examining not only natural but also cultural and built environments.
Reflecting on the inaugural ARF projects, Executive Vice President for Research Ramamoorthy Ramesh observed, “This new initiative will be truly transformative for the school and the university, allowing us to expand the breadth of scholarly inquiry across the entire spectrum of the university, including architecture, urbanism, and the built environment more broadly.”
“The Architecture Research Fellowship recognizes both the importance of scholarly inquiry in our field and its immense diversity,” said Igor Marjanović, William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “Research in architecture encompasses a broad spectrum of inquiry—from design to history, theory, and technology—including many methodologies and scales, from local to global, from the scale of individual objects to that of the entire environment. I am delighted that our first cohort of ARF fellows also exemplifies that breadth, clearly demonstrating why architecture matters in a changing world.”
The Architecture Research Fellowship awards will be presented during Rice Architecture’s annual awards ceremony in Farish Gallery, MD Anderson Hall, on Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at 5:00 p.m. A reception will follow the ceremony.