PennDesign's Ockman Awarded Graham Foundation Grant to Pursue New Publication

CHICAGO—The Graham Foundation has named Joan Ockman, lecturer and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design’s Department of Architecture, among a select group of individuals awarded funds to pursue projects that engage original ideas in architecture.

The new grantees comprise a diverse group of architects, artists, designers, filmmakers, scholars, educators, curators, and writers around the world in cities such as Istanbul, Montreal, Tokyo, and Chicago, where the Graham Foundation is based. The Graham Foundation will award over $490,000 to support 63 outstanding projects, from exhibitions, publications, multimedia archives, documentary films and podcasts to symposia, participatory workshops and live performances.

“These diverse projects advance new scholarship in the field of architecture, fuel creative experimentation and critical dialogue, and expand opportunities for public engagement with architecture and its role in contemporary society,” according to the Foundation’s press release.

PennDesign’s Ockman was awarded in the category of publications for Architecture among Other Things, which gathers twenty-five essays and occasional pieces written by the author over the course of her career as an architectural critic, historian and educator.

Treating a wide range of topics—from Tafuri to Times Square, Gehry to Ground Zero, the Seagram Building to the Seattle Library—the collection reflects on architecture's adjacency to other things, on architecture as a thing, on the relationship between intellectual and material work, on the need for imagination, and on the necessity of architectural criticism today. Several essays have never before been published; others exist only in out-of-print or non-English-language publications.

For more information, visit www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/5333-architecture-among-other-things-writings-19852015-by-joan-ockman.