2024 Buell Graduate Fellowships
The Buell Graduate Fellowship is an annual award for historical research on the built environment, including but not limited to architecture, urbanism, landscape, and the building sciences.
Awards are given annually for the purposes of facilitating primary research in conjunction with a master's thesis or PhD dissertation project. Interdisciplinary or comparative work on the Americas is especially encouraged. Though research may be conducted in a time and manner of their choosing, applicants must be enrolled full-time in a Columbia University graduate school, including but not limited to GSAPP and GSAS, both currently and continuing in the fall. In addition to receiving support for their research, winning candidates will have the opportunity to present their work at a Buell Center-organized event.
Recipients: Charlette Caldwell, Lucia Galaretto, Cecília Resende Santos, Benjamin Weisgall, Rebecca Yuste, Alex Zivkovic
Charlette Caldwell, PhD Candidate (Architecture)
The Crucible of the Freedom Church: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Culture of Building in the United States, 1790s-1930s
Which cultural, economic, and political processes influenced Black building culture from the 1790s to the 1930s? This dissertation proposes an answer through a history of the creation and evolution of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, investigating the connection between this institution’s building history and the ontological evolution of perceptions of “Blackness”. By consulting primary material created by AME congregants and documenting their experiences in building alongside reviewing secondary material focused on the religious, sociological, and political history of the AME Church, this study looks to unearth how Black Church building reflected issues of class, identity, and respectability amongst the AMEs, demonstrating how the AME culture of building formed within a crucible marred by the vestiges of slavery, violence, and discrimination against Black Americans in the United States. As such, this architectural narrative explores Protestant architectural trends in AME Church building campaigns and discussions surrounding the importance of not only expanding the Church, but also challenging racist assumptions about Black people, showing various spatial counternarratives that complicate racialized minorities as architectural protagonists.
“New” Bethel African M.E. Church, Philadelphia, PA. Built in 1889 by Architects Edward Hazlehurst and Samuel Huckel
Lucia Galaretto, PhD Candidate (Architecture)
Forms of Exchange: Architecture and Trade in South America, 1780-1880
Forms of Exchange examines the relationship between architecture production, commercial transactions, and the rise of antiquarianism in South America during the long nineteenth century. Departing from the familiar narrative of transition from a tightly controlled colonial economy to individual efforts by sovereign states to promote free trade, the project traces the afterlives of Spanish extractive infrastructures as they intersected with shifting trade networks managed by British commercial houses and local Creole partners. To tell this story, the research will focus on the material sites of domestic corporate initiatives—a company for purchasing silver ore appended to the Royal Mint in Potosí, a successively refashioned Bank and Stock Exchange in Buenos Aires, and a joint-stock venture for the extraction of ancient artifacts in Lima. It does so to examine the spatial and aesthetic implications of particular modes of hoarding, circulation, and exchange that emerged across these dispersed sites. Working alongside mining entrepreneurs, transatlantic merchants, elite financiers, and antiquarian circles, architects and engineers furnished the structures that helped mediate between the encroachment of conspicuous consumption, the elusive expectations of future revenue, and the artifacts inherited from a past rendered increasingly distant after independence. In that sense, the project seeks to investigate how nineteenth-century vernacular eclecticism not only followed the expansion of a global market but also shored up a particular form of historical past.
Real Casa de Moneda, Potosí, 1765. Archivo General de Indias, MCD
Cecília Resende Santos, PhD Candidate (Art History)
Labor, Land, and Taste in Brazilian Coffee Landscapes, c. 1870–1920
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Brazil was the world’s largest coffee exporter, accounting for half of the global supply. This fellowship will support archival research on the buildings and landscapes of coffee production in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brazil, examining how these spaces responded to the crisis of slavery, mediated foreign capital, and reflected concerns about environmental depletion. Coffee was “converted” into architecture: local and foreign investment brought street lighting, paved streets, mansions, and banks to rapidly modernizing urban locales. Conversely, land and labor were painstakingly “converted” into coffee by means of architecture and infrastructure. This growth was fueled by intensified exploitation of labor and soil, facilitated by extensive new railways, ports, plantations (fazendas), and eventually research institutions. The arrangement of coffee plantations responded to labor and environmental pressures, producing new techniques of labor management and constantly pushing cultivation towards new frontiers. Research institutions attempted to provide scientific solutions to the problems of soil exhaustion and productivity, circulating in the process verbal and visual rhetorics of scarcity and abundance. Portside, coffee warehouses, tasting rooms, and trading houses applied logistical operations and aesthetic criteria to determine the value of coffee as a consumer good. Beyond the management of resources, each of these spaces was invested in the aesthetics of modernity, growth, and wealth.
Marc Ferrez, Slaves working on a coffee yard in a farm in the Paraíba River Valley (1882)
Benjamin Weisgall, PhD Candidate (Architecture)
Patterns of Improvement: The Commercialization of Architectural Knowledge in Imperial Britain, 1750-1800
Architectural pattern books were a popular genre in 18th-century Britain, circulating across social ranks and throughout the empire. In contrast to treatises on the architectural orders or construction specifications full of details, patterns were templates for whole buildings. They shaped building habits and projects directly. Drawing upon theories of media and histories of knowledge, this dissertation reconstructs the vernacular knowledge of the built environment that circulated in these pattern books in the early modern Anglo-world. Patterns were units of architecture that could be readily recognized, communicated, compiled, compared, and emulated. They also reorganized knowledge about architecture’s history during the ‘global enlightenment,’ its geography, its technologies, and the conduct of its practitioners. While most historiography subsumes these books within a story of standardization, in fact they generally promoted a different goal: that of improvement. In these books, ‘good’ architecture was the kind who could increase and formalize the value of land. Moving from Britain’s garden tradition to the ruralization of its empire—including by studying later American pattern book literature—the dissertation reads pattern-based architecture as a technique of improvement, used by a wellspring of extra-professional figures like landlords and country builders.
Pages from Robert Morris's The Architectural Remembrancer, printed in London for the author in 1751
Rebecca Yuste, PhD Candidate (Art History)
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Art and the Idea of Nature in the Mexican Enlightenment (1785-1813)
The late 18th century was a moment of increased scientific activity in the Spanish Empire. Seeking to both know and control its overseas territories, a key component of the Bourbon Reforms, the Crown sponsored botanical expeditions across the Americas. These expeditions collected specimens, made drawings and took down measurements of the natural world, using cutting-edge techniques of taxonomy and chemical analysis to order and understand the flora, fauna and minerals encountered. In New Spain, present-day Mexico, academies and scientific institutions were also established, tasked with codifying knowledge and bolstering research. This dissertation traces the entangled exchange that emerged in this period between nature, science and art, asking how biological drawing, architecture and garden design mediated the relationship between empire and the natural world. This project investigates the importance of representing, acclimatizing, and extracting for the aim of colonial control, and how these techniques of reproduction acted to construct an imaginary of the territory as abundant, productive and refined. This fellowship will support archival research related to the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain and its program of biological illustration.
Miguel Constansó. Plan of the land destined for the Botanical Garden. Archivo General de Indias, MP Mexico 416
Alex Zivkovic, PhD Candidate (Art History)
Ambient Empire: Ecologies, Colonies, and Nature Vivante in Modern Paris, 1860-1940
This dissertation is an architectural and environmental history of the Parisian greenhouses, aquariums, and colonial gardens that were built for World’s Fair events, from 1860 to 1940. These popular, immersive sites have been neglected in scholarship of urban spectacle, despite their important links to empire. Tracing the engineering techniques required to sustain living specimens in these ecosystems, this dissertation argues that these simulations of nature were shadows of colonization overseas. They both advertised and reproduced colonial connections by using the very same infrastructures that supported colonizers abroad (climate regulation, water systems, etc.) to support plants and animals in Paris. Each chapter reveals direct connections between these sites and ongoing imperial, environmental projects like tropical settlements in West Africa, water infrastructures in Algeria, and plantations in the Caribbean. Issues of race are essential to this narrative: greenhouses staged evolutionary racial ideas and colonial gardens raised concerns about invasive species and human migration to France. Ecology was biopolitical—just as simulations were managed in Paris, so too were plants, animals, and human populations overseas. Media-theoretical and ecocritical attention to these buildings, landscapes, and connecting infrastructures reveals the role ecological simulations played in propagandizing ideas about technological modernity, race, nature, and empire.
Frédéric Gadmer, Martinique Pavilion at the Exposition Coloniale in Paris, 1931, autochrome, Albert Kahn Archives