H+U+D Research Grants Support Dissertation Research by 2024–25 Awardees Rami Kanafani and Jack Schonewolf

 Humanities + Urbanism + Design (H+U+D) Initiative 2024–25 awardees Rami Kanafani and Jack Schonewolf reflect on how the H+U+D research grant supported key stages of their dissertation research.

H+U+D is a Mellon sponsored joint initiative between the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) and the Weitzman School of Design that promotes collaboration across the humanities and design disciplines. Organized around the theme The Inclusive City, the initiative provides research grants to graduate students pursuing interdisciplinary projects that focus on the built environment.

Rami Kanafani, a PhD candidate in Architecture, used the H+U+D grant to visit the Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The grant supported travel and access to materials that were central to advancing his dissertation research. Reflecting on the impact of the grant, Rami says:

Last year, when I applied for the H+U+D grant, I set out to explore the connections between Buckminster Fuller, the designer and inventor known mostly for patenting the geodesic dome, and the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. This connection is central to the argument of my dissertation that explores the New Age culture’s architectural experiments from the late ‘60s to the early ‘90s. I was looking for instances of inspiration beyond the use of domes in countercultural and New Age communes. In other words, I was attempting to draw connections between the New Age—a spiritual movement and a new system of thought concerned with issues of individual consciousness, personal growth, environmental awareness, and planetary well-being—and Fuller’s humanism, his philosophy of wholeness, and his opposition to disciplinary specialization. 

I used the H+U+D grant in December 2024 to go to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California where the Fuller archives are housed. I spent 10 days at the archives there looking through Fuller’s papers, particularly his Dymaxion Chronofile, an eclectic collection of fragments, correspondence, notes, articles, images, and patent applications organized not thematically but chronologically. Fuller started collecting and saving everything that crossed his path in the late 1920s and, by the end of his life, had compiled more than a 1000 linear feet of boxed material that is now available for research. 

I was delighted to confirm my initial premises: that Fuller’s thinking was foundational to the New Age system of thought. I discovered that Fuller’s relationship to New Age futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard (pictured with Fuller) was closer than I anticipated. He had endorsed her toward the end of his life for her bid for the vice presidency of the United States for 1984, a surprising revelation considering his staunch opposition to politics. He also unofficially named her as the successor to his philosophy of approaching world problems in a comprehensive, holistic way. Fuller was also involved in the D’Arros Conference in the Seychelles in 1978, organized by Prince Chahram Pahlavi, nephew of the Shah of Iran and involving a group of theologians and scholars who met to discuss the necessary steps to cross the threshold into an epoch of new consciousness, a New Age. Fuller was also invited to numerous New Age conferences in late 1970s and early 80s, many of which he had to decline due to his busy schedule toward the end of his life. These and other discoveries shaped a convincing image of Fuller’s influence on New Age thinking that is pivotal to my dissertation.

Jack Schonewolf, a PhD student in Architecture, describes how the grant enabled him to pursue alternative research strategies when travel was not possible. He used the funds to acquire essential library materials that proved critical to the development of his project. Describing his research process, Jack explains: 

My application for the H+U+D grant in the Fall of 2024 sought to explore the responses to the urban crisis of the nineteen sixties and seventies in the United States and France. I planned to travel up and down the East Coast to visit the archives of a key group of American urban intellectuals that prioritized vision, legibility, and security in response to the Modernist city in crisis—Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Oscar Newman—as well as the various state archives in and around Paris that captured the ways the state and its police responded to decolonization and its spatial manifestations, the bidonvilles and the banlieues.     

What a difference a year makes! In December of 2024, my wife and I welcomed our second child; the resulting sleepless nights forced me to rethink my grand plans. The grant has proved invaluable in this process, allowing me to remain productive during a phase of life that has required flexibility and adaptation. Childcare responsibilities have kept me close to home and away from campus over the past year, which has pushed travel to the back burner. Instead, during this homebound period, I have utilized the money for book purchases that have allowed me to re-create a library at home. Specifically, H+U+D has provided me with the means to take chances on books and pursue subject matter that may not have immediately appeared relevant to my work, replicating one of the great joys of being in the stacks. For example, a recent random purchase of a Video Art survey, spurred on by a reference from another purchased book, helped me to reconfigure my dissertation proposal and revealed new archives for exploration. 

Just as importantly, these readings provided a new lens through which to look at material from a previously obtained from Oscar Newman's archive. After encounters with video art and concepts like protective media, Newman’s interior rendering for the Bronxdale Houses, found in Newman’s folder dedicated to his Defensible Space book [1972], took on newfound importance. While his book foregrounded human vision as key to defending the home, this image showed how important video technology was to this project of security. Closed circuit television reoriented the private home by both bringing inside an endless stream of images of the ‘ungovernable city’ outside and linking the private home to an off-site public control room. I am now interested in analyzing the impact that CCTV had on architecture and the postwar city, as a means of both historicizing the surveillance state and challenging the dichotomies that are fundamental to architecture and urban historiography: transparency / opacity; openness / secrecy; visibility / anonymity; public / private; inside / outside.