Open call for 2024 research fellowship programs

We think of the CCA as a research institution, concerned not only with building new knowledge but also with making that knowledge productive. To do this, we apply architectural perspectives to topics beyond their usual disciplinary scope and methods from other fields to traditionally architectural subjects. We aim to adopt new ways of investigating that combine cultures and perspectives emerging from architectural practice, curatorial and publishing practice, and academic study.

Research programs in academic and cultural institutions, including the CCA, offer a rich opportunity for speculation and the production of knowledge. The research programs that we offer provide opportunities for additional perspectives. We are now opening calls for applications for three research programs in 2024: the CCA Virtual Fellowship, the CCA Research Fellowship, and the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship. All applications must be submitted by September 25, 2023.

The 2024 edition of the Virtual Fellowship Program, The Architectural Media of Urgency, invites applicants to put forward proposals that are concerned with what constitutes urgent architectural media today. Whether considering short form documentary, lens-based image making, vellum drawings, or digital renderings researchers are asked to engage with our Collection to surface diverse forms of “evidence” to support their claims about the forms and practices of representation that should be valued in contemporary architectural discourse. The two selected fellows will be encouraged to undertake research that puts the CCA Collection into conversation with material held elsewhere to investigate how architectural media puts forward specific framings of “urgency” in history and design practice. 

The 2024 Research Fellowship Program is open to researchers, architects, and curators who intend to pursue interdisciplinary research on architecture, urbanism, landscape, and/or design at the CCA. We welcome applications from individuals who hold a PhD, or with equivalent professional experience. We value interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment that work from anthropology to Indigenous studies and beyond. Although proposed research projects may rely extensively on the CCA Collection as a primary source, we are interested above all in original and significant projects that develop both critical readings and creative research, media, and/or designs. 

Research Fellows are selected by an International Consultative Committee made up of eight members: Phyllis Lambert (Founding Director Emeritus, CCA), Giovanna Borasi (Director and Chief Curator, CCA), Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA), Juan Du, (University of Toronto), Seng Kuan (University of Tokyo, Harvard University and A+U), Shannon Mattern (University Pennsylvania), Itohan Osayimwese (Brown University), and Nasrine Seraji (University College Dublin).

In its third and final edition, the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program Above/Below/Between: Light on a Damaged Planet continues to seek to understand architecture’s varied relationships to the changing material constitution of the light spectrum. The recognition of the manifold meanings and architectural mediations of light, which are becoming only more salient in our era of ecological crises, is common to both the CCA and the Window Research Institute. In 2024 we will welcome three CCA-WRI Fellows for periods of research of up to three months, with Fellows turning their attention to the third element in the diffusion of light across our solar societies: between, and the everyday conditions that permeate how light shapes and is shaped by the built environment.

The “between” names a specific set of phenomena that become apparent between the atmosphere and land, ones that reflect the Earth’s condition as a solar-dependent environment. These include, for example, the increasing levels of air pollution across the globe, and how this is becoming a major concern for everyday human activities in towns and cities. The “between” contains the chemical aftereffects of carbon combustion, industrial production, and forest fires. Air pollution thus becomes a phenomenon that generates a range of mitigation practices, from investments in public transit to green industrial technologies more broadly.

Similarly, the between is mediated by the role windows play as apertures through which social, ecological, and political thresholds are navigated across geographic and climatic conditions. The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program seeks expansive and theoretically ambitious approaches to the “between” that can make out how it is a condition that moves through and connects the scale of the built environment through shared, inhabitable phenomena including air pollution indexes; political and social resistance to the growth of public transit investment; or hurricanes and other major weather events that reconfigure the boundaries between waterways and places of human inhabitation. 

The jury members for this edition of the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program are Giovanna Borasi and Rafico Ruiz, who are joined by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Co-Founder of Atelier Bow-Wow/Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology/WRI Board of Directors Member), Daniel Barber (Head of School, School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney), and Masatake Shinohara (Associate Professor, The Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies in Human Survivability, Kyoto University). 

Find out more about our research fellowship programs and application requirements here. We also invite you to browse the work of past fellows and research activities on our timeline.

For more, and to find out about the upcoming opportunities, subscribe here.