Today, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announced that Chilean architect Samuel Bravo has won this year's Wheelwright Prize, an annual program that awards $100,000 for travel-based research to architects who have graduated in the prior 15 years. Bravo's proposed research project, "Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements," will include travel to Bangladesh, Nepal, and India, as well as the Amazon basin and flatlands and urban areas in Africa.
Bravo, a practicing architect based in Chile, received his B.Arch. from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he is now an assistant professor of architectural design. Bravo's work includes the Melimoyu Cabin in Patagonia, Chile (2011), Ani Nii Shöbo in Ucayali, Perú (2009, with Sandra Iturriaga), and Nii Juinti School in Ucayali, Perú (2014, with Sandra Iturriaga).
The other finalists for this year's prize were Lucia Cella (Studio Cella in Posadas, Argentina), Andjela Karabašević (AKVS in Belgrade, Serbia), and Farzin Lotfi-Jam (Farzinfarzin in New York City). (Bravo was a finalist for last year's prize, which went to Anna Puigjaner.) The jury for this year's prize comprised architect Gordon Gill, FAIA, of Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture; K. Michael Hays, the GSD's associate dean of academic affairs; Mariana Ibañez, an associate professor of architecture at GSD; Mohsen Mostafavi, GSD's dean; and Gia Wolff, a designer and the 2013 winner of the Wheelwright Prize.
"Only a prize that prioritizes travel and open-ended discovery," Wolff said, according to a press release, "could allow an architect to do what Samuel Bravo wants and needs to do—to experience situations likely to range from primitive to chaotic, to live with and learn from diverse communities, to document common building knowledge, with the goal of transforming this knowledge into practicing concepts."
Read ARCHITECT's past coverage of the Wheelwright Prize.
