The six winners hail from the U.S., Italy, and Germany, and will spend three and a half months completing an in-residency research program at the Wimbledon House in London.
On December 10, 2018, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) revealed the six winners of the third annual Richard Rogers Fellowship residency program. Hailing from the U.S., Italy, and Germany, the fellows will each spend three and a half months at the Richard Rogers, Hon. FAIA–designed Wimbledon House in London to pursue research on a variety of issues. The program will also award each fellow a $10,000 cash prize and cover expenses to and from London.
Launched in October 2016, the fellowship is "inspired by Rogers’s commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation and engagement," according to a GSD press release.
SAH Member Peter Christensen was among the six awardees.
Peter Christensen, Rochester, N.Y.
Research: Materialized: the Global Life of Architectural Steel
Bio and Project Description:Peter Christensen is assistant professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2014. His specialization is modern architectural and environmental history, particularly of Germany, Central Europe, and the Middle East. His theoretical interests center on issues of geopolitics and multiculturalism. He also maintains a strong interest in infrastructure and its history.
Christensen plans to use the Richard Rogers Fellowship towards research for his forthcoming second book. By following the life of steel from the collection of raw minerals and metals to the distribution of finished goods in the long 19th century, instead of examining heroic architectural forms made from steel, Christenen’s book aims to challenge the traditional narrative that architectural steel was the primary and heroic material responsible for architectural modernism. He intends to achieve this revisionist interpretation by combining the methods of environmental history, which focuses on ecology and the macro scale, with localized sources of business and trade history, especially corporate archives.
To see profiles of all six awardees, click here.
Peter Christensen has been an SAH member since 2008.