The Canadian Centre for Architecture welcomes applications for two virtual fellowships, each to be held for a three-week period between September and December. The format of the fellowship supports our long-term investment in thinking through how digitized CCA Collection material can generate new historical configurations and timely interpretations, and how it can have a broader reach within architecture research. It also puts the two fellows into conversation to share perspectives and research insights. The Virtual Fellowship Program runs alongside our Research Fellowship Program to increase the accessibility of our Collection.

The CCA’s 2025 Virtual Fellowship seeks to gauge what research questions matter most to architects, landscape architects, urban planners, and other design professionals under the surface of the day to day. We are looking for persistent questions—those that resonate with practitioners navigating various pressures including those of time, cost, and skewed perceptions of risk.

Deadlines. Deliverables. Demands. Architectural practices worldwide contend with the constraints of the profession. The political economy of architecture generates pressures that revolve around the allocation of parcels of time, with condensed project management schedules, oriented to profit, dictating the pace of production. Research is often compressed and siloed to a project’s initial phase, rather than having an ongoing role in the process.

The 2025 edition of the Virtual Fellowship Program is open to design practitioners at any stage of their career, whether operating in a large firm or independently. We welcome applications from both active designers and researchers with substantial recent experience in the field. They can bring ongoing projects from within their practices that are holding their attention and that could merit a period of reflection and research. These projects could enter into dialogue with the CCA Collection, looking to the drawings, models, and correspondence of architects from the twentieth century and further into the past to seek for ways of navigating design decisions.

These projects could address and expand upon themes such as:
• Environmental sustainability and building performance research
• Material histories and sourcing
• Place-based archival research
• Histories of representational techniques and technologies
• Analogue modes of production

Fellows are encouraged to put CCA Collection material into conversation with a wide array of research materials held elsewhere, particularly project-specific documentation.

Virtual Fellows will collaborate with CCA staff to curate a selection of objects related to the theme that can provide an open-access resource for future research and instruction. Fellows will commit to working twelve hours per week on their project over the three-weeks, for which they will each receive a 2 500 CAD honorarium, with the additional benefit of research assistance provided by the CCA Collection team.

Applicants to the Virtual Fellowship Program should undertake an initial survey of our Collection—processed archival material, Prints and Drawings, library materials, and our Photography collection—and briefly describe the specific objects they will mobilize to examine critically the 2025 theme.

Applications should include the following materials (in English or French):
• A proposal (500 words) that describes the question holding the applicant’s attention and concern in practice, and how it relates to an ongoing project
• An overview (250 words) of the applicant’s practice and its guiding philosophy
• A curriculum vitae, including the names and contact of two references

All applications must be submitted online through the CCA application portal

Deadline: 6 June 2025 at midnight (EST)

The 2025 Virtual Fellowship Program selection committee includes Ann Lui (Future Firm), Hamed Bukhamseen and Ali Ismail Karimi (Civil Architecture), Irene Chin (Curator, Contemporary Architecture, CCA), and Rafico Ruiz (Associate Director, Research, CCA).

For questions regarding the program, please contact studium@cca.qc.ca.

For updates on the program, please subscribe to the CCA newsletter.

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