The format of the fellowship supports our long-term investment in thinking through how already digitized and accessible CCA Collection material can generate new historical configurations, timely interpretations, and a broader reach within architectural research. The Virtual Fellowship Program will run alongside our Research Fellowship Program to increase the accessibility of the CCA Collection.

In order to activate the CCA Collection at a distance, Virtual Fellows will commit to collaborate with CCA staff to refine and curate a selection of objects related to modes of elemental design and write a critical essay for the CCA website that, alongside the object selection, serves as an open-access resource for future research. Fellows will commit to working twenty-five hours per week on their project over the six-week period, for which they will each receive a CAD 5,000 honorarium, with the additional benefit of tailored research assistance provided by the CCA Collection team.

We welcome applicants working on topics that examine how design maintains ties to racialized sites and bodies, mobilizes notions of futurity premised on the resurgence of historically marginalized groups, and, more generally, demonstrates how the CCA Collection should be read intersectionally and transversally through the lens of critical historiography. We particularly encourage projects from early career researchers who hold a PhD and/or equivalent professional experience.

The theme for the inaugural 2021 Virtual Fellowship Program is Building Matter. It asks researchers, curators, artists, and other cultural producers to consider how architects and other designers have relied on practices of the manipulation, extraction, projection, and inhabitation of planetary matter. From the Greek classical elements of earth, air, water, and fire to chemical elements scattered across the periodic table, designers have reconfigured and shaped the compositional elements of our planet through the projective needs of building. This process has resulted in so-called new materials—from alloys to solar panels to synthetic woods—that foreground the malleability of matter and the broader consequences of a human-led manipulation of ecological systems.

The call for applications is now closed.

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James Graham
California College of the Arts
Planetary Dam

Maren Koehler
University of Sydney
Paper, Pulp and Plywood, ca. 1967

Marina Oba
Federal University of Paraná
Building ephemeral matter in the Georg Lippsmeier collection