The CCA’s 2025 Virtual Fellowship sought 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 were 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 was opened to design practitioners at any stage of their career, whether operating in a large firm or independently. We welcomed applications from both active designers and researchers with substantial recent experience in the field. They could bring ongoing projects from within their practices that were 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