The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Thandi Loewenson as the 2024 Wheelwright Prize winner. The $100,000 grant encourages research that is globally-minded and takes an investigative approach to modern architecture.

Titled The Black Papers: Beyond the Politics of Land, Towards African Policies of Earth & Air, the project explores the complex web of social and spatial relations in contemporary Africa. 

While land's significance in the context of African liberation movements and the postcolonial governments that followed has primarily been examined in terms of private property, eviction and redistribution, agriculture, and mining, Loewenson introduces an analytical framework she refers to as "the entanglement of Earth and Air," which completely changes our understanding of the subject.

By using this framework, Loewenson broadens our understanding of land interpretations to encompass a wide range of overlapping above- and below-ground terrains, from a single breath of air to entire weather systems, and from rare metals buried deep beneath the Earth's crust to the digital cloud and ionosphere.

"This work situates land within a network of interconnected spaces, from layers deep within the Earth to its outermost atmospheric reaches," said Thandi Loewenson.

Loewenson, an architect and researcher who was born in Harare, uses performance, literature, and design to ignite the flames of collective action and emancipatory political thought, as well as to sense the edges of alternative, plausible worlds. She is a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, and she holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, UCL.

Thandi Loewenson, Whisper Network Intelsat 502 (still), 2022. Performance and drawings (graphite on tarkovski paper). Image courtesy of  the Wheelwright Prize

In order to challenge the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality, and the numerous frontiers of oppression that exist in contemporary architectural education and practice, Loewenson co-founded the architectural collective BREAK//LINE, which she describes as a “act of creative solidarity” that “resists definition with intent.” The collective was established at The Bartlett in 2018. 

"The question of land, and its indelible link to African liberation and being, echoes across the continent as a central theme of liberation movements and the postcolonial governments that followed. Instead of solely engaging land as a site of struggle, this work situates land within a network of interconnected spaces, from layers deep within the Earth to its outermost atmospheric reaches," said Loewenson. 

"This research presents a radical shift: developing a new epistemic framework and a series of open-access, creatively reimagined policy proposals—the Black Papers—in which earth and air are not distinct, but rather concomitant terrains through which racialization and exploitation are forged on the continent, and through which they will be fought."

"The Wheelwright Prize is uniquely placed to support such ambitious inquiry, enabling me to bring together seemingly disparate yet closely bound parts of our planet, and agitate for a more just and flourishing world," Loewenson added.

Loewenson's research and travels will be funded for two years by the Wheelwright Prize. She intends to concentrate her efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, which are the seven African countries.

"Expanding what constitutes architectural research, Thandi defines a sectional slice of inquiry that spans from the subterranean to the celestial. Her project is nothing short of a full reconceptualization of land and sky as material realities, sources of value, and sites of political struggle," said Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD. 

"Such vision exemplifies the kind of ambition the Wheelwright Prize is meant to support. Along with the rest of the jury, I could not be more thrilled that she is this year’s winner," Whiting added.

In 2023, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng won the Wheelwright Prize. Marina Otero was selected as the winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize, and Germane Barnes was selected as the winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize.

Thandi Loewenson was selected from a highly competitive and international pool of applicants, including Meriem Chabani, Nathan Friedman, and Ryan Roark. 

Together with Whiting and Newsom, the jury panel for the 2024 prize include: Chris Cornelius, professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning; K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and co-director of the Master in Design Studies program at the GSD; Jennifer Newsom, co-founder of Dream the Combine and assistant professor at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; John Peterson, curator of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard GSD; and Noura Al Sayeh, head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities.

Top image in the article: Thandi Loewenson. Image © Niall Finn.

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