Katrib selected as one of 42 global Graham Foundation grantees
Leen Katrib, assistant professor in the University of Kentucky College of Design’s School of Architecture, has been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in support of her research project “From Denver to Chicago: Racial Geographies and the Enduring Underside of Miesian Modernism.”
“The Graham Foundation is a truly respected organization, and I'm honored and humbled to receive their support,” Katrib said.
The project investigates how a group of architects trained under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology played a pivotal role in the 1970s expansion of Denver’s Auraria Campus, a project that displaced a longstanding Chicano community.
Set against the backdrop of a growing Chicano liberation movement, Katrib’s research explores how Miesian design principles were intentionally adapted to a Hispanic context, raising questions about the racial implications of modernist planning.
By tracing the connections between Mies van der Rohe’s pedagogy and its application by his followers in both Denver and Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, the project calls for a critical revision of Miesian modernism’s legacy and its lasting impact on racialized urban geographies in the United States.
With the support of an $8,000 grant from the Graham Foundation, Katrib travelled to archival repositories in Denver and Chicago in this summer to continue developing the project. This research trip focused on digitizing previously unpublished materials related to the Auraria Campus’s development and its social and architectural impacts.
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation is one of the most significant funders in the field of architecture, supporting innovative projects that shed new light on the built environment. Katrib’s project is one of the Graham Foundation’s 42 individual grantees this year, selected from an international pool of established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars and writers.
This year’s grantees hail from across the globe in places like Athens; Berlin; Paris; London and more to cities across the United States including Charlottesville, Virginia; Chicago; Honolulu, Hawaii; Los Angeles; Miami; New Orleans; New York; and Lexington, Kentucky. To learn more about the project, visit: http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/6708-from-denver-to-chicago-racial-geographies-and-the-enduring-underside-of-miesian-modernism.