Montréal Québec H3H 2S6
Canada
Across the world, places once central to daily life have been left unused. As economies shift and populations shrink, homes, factories, public buildings, and entire sites are being abandoned. These forms of vacancy reflect recurring cycles of urban growth and decline, revealing social and spatial fractures within local life across multiple scales. At the same time, they invite a reconsideration of how land is valued, designed, and inhabited.
These concerns are shared by both the CCA and the Window Research Institute (WRI). Building on a collaboration that began in 2021, the two institutions continue to develop a new model of fellowship that brings their respective perspectives into dialogue—while the CCA addresses an ever-expanding array of architectural subjects, the WRI focuses specifically on windows in their spatial, cultural, and societal dimensions.
Together, we are launching the 2026–2028 cycle of the CCA–WRI Research Fellowship Program, which invites projects that reconsider conditions of vacancy and their histories, and that open space for dialogue on new approaches to urban and rural development and their related practices of land use.
The program will convene designers, municipal and urban officials, and researchers to explore and reimagine dialogues between real-world, ongoing projects and sites related to vacant land and buildings. Each summer from 2026 to 2028, three CCA-WRI Research Fellows will engage with specific sites from recently completed or active research and/or design projects to see how the generation of vacant land, buildings, and other spatial conditions works across geographical contexts, urban and rural realities, political circumstances, and timeframes. On an annual basis, the program puts the three fellows into collaborative dialogue with the intent of creating an experimental space for thinking and active design.
Vacancy is a condition that encompasses both vacant buildings and vacant lands. While these two share commonalities, they relate to distinct social contexts and offer different possibilities for cities and rural locations. Vacant land harbours potential not only for human-centric “use” but also as part of the land’s biocycle. These dynamics further link to disaster prevention, mitigating the heat island effect, enhancing urban sponge functionality, and improving soil health. Vacant buildings can also be viewed as material banks, enabling resource circulation within communities. Just as “share houses” in Japan and “loft living” in certain US urban contexts emerged over the past several decades, low rent has transformed risk into a new form of value creation and real estate speculation. These urban sites also offer new fields for designers. With the intensification of global warming, a combination of human-made and natural disasters have created vacancy as an increasingly shared societal condition that disregards national borders.
Within the program, the CCA Collection offers an open space for exploration. Researchers with active design projects that may not otherwise benefit from a historical perspective can turn their attention to, by way of example, OMA’s proposal for the development of Downsview Park, Gordon Matta Clark’s site-specific works, or Tadashi Kawamata’s photographic project that speculates on sites of precarious inhabitation in Montreal. These materials and other projects in the CCA Collection can spark ideas on how to engage with sites of intense urban and rural transition. The CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program seeks to build an experimental research format that allows designers and researchers to ground ongoing projects in the CCA’s Collection by undertaking in-depth, historically informed research, and also collaborate and exchange with peer practitioner-academics from around the world—building a space in which theoretical exploration can move towards on-the-ground action.
We welcome applications that focus on sites actively contending with vacancy as a social, cultural, political, and spatial condition, and that develop theoretical models capable of informing design practice. Vacancy may be approached broadly yet in situated ways, across urban and rural contexts shaped by economic, demographic, and environmental change. We encourage work that explores how vacancy is produced, experienced, and represented, and how these dynamics can challenge or enrich design methods. Approaches may include examining vacancy as a spatial-cultural category; studying the political and spatial economies of vacant buildings; or analyzing vacant land as a social and political construct. Applicants might also engage with histories of land use and urban decision-making, industrialization’s spatial legacy, or global warming’s role in rendering land disposable. Other perspectives could consider landscape approaches to demographic decline, taxation, and zoning; rural experiences of growth and decline; and the material cycles of vacant buildings through reuse, recycling, or decomposition.
The fellowship is open to practitioners (architects, landscape architects, urban planners, urban decision makers, cultural producers, artists) with substantial professional experience, as well as researchers holding a doctoral degree in relevant fields, and particularly applicants working at the intersection of practice and academia who can demonstrate a commitment to research, publishing, exhibiting, or a publicly accountable research practice.
The Advisory Committee for the 2026–2028 cycle of the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program consists of the following members: Maurice D. Cox (Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD), Mio Tsuneyama (Architect, studio mnm/ HOLES), Giovanna Borasi (Director and Chief Curator, CCA), and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA).
CCA-WRI Fellows will be offered a residency at the CCA between June and September 2026, for a period of one to three months, including a private office and access to the CCA Collection. Each Fellow will receive a monthly stipend of CAD 5,000 (up to three months), as well as additional financial support for travel and visa expenses.
The deadline for applications is December 21, 2025. For further information, application guidelines and instructions on how to apply, visit our website.
For updates on the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program and to stay in touch, subscribe to the CCA newsletter.
