AA Landscape and Urbanism Granted Graham Award

The Graham Foundation has announced the award of $609,500 for grants to organizations including innovative projects led by eminent and emerging architects, artists, curators, filmmakers, historians, and publishers, among other professionals. Selected from over 200 proposals, the 53 awarded projects support work that continues to advocate for engaging original ideas that advance our understanding of the designed environment.

The AA's Landscape and Urbanism Graduate Design Programme has been awarded for its publication Landscape as Territory. It is a cartographic book project that critically addresses the agency of architects in the so-called "urban age," through an understanding of territory as a design praxis through which consequential landscapes are produced. Territory, understood as a “political technology,” has the capacity to involve architects and designers into complex social, political, technical, legal, strategic, and economic processes that are both historical and geographical engines of contemporary urbanization. Territorial praxis is interrogated in a collection of threaded theory and design contributions where essays pose key questions that are addressed through projective cartographies, unfolding arguments related to three sections: (1) territory, (2) critical cartographies and (3) agency. This material proposes a critical reappropriation of cartographic tools, complicit in the production of territories, to question and expand the architect’s agency, beyond its current disciplinary confinements.

Landscape as Territory is edited and authored by Clara Oloriz Sanjuan and features essays by Stuart Elden on Territory; by Mark Duffield, Marti Peran and Liam Mouritz on Cartography; and by Douglas Spencer on Agency, together with project theses from the AALU programme. 

To learn more about the 2018 grants to organizations visit the Graham Foundation website.