AA alumna Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, who received her PhD by Design and MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) from the AA, has been awarded the 2023 Wheelwright Prize as announced by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). The Wheelwright Prize is a competition open to international candidates that acknowledges excellent work by architects early in their careers. The winner is awarded a $100,000 fellowship to support their research.

Cyan was shortlisted for her research project ‘Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift’. She explains: ‘The project dissects iconic sites – that give form to spatiocultural imaginations fuelled by colonial globalisation and high consumption – through tracing bodies set adrift by the act to build and revealing the phantom territories these sites rely on. From airport and beach, tracing sand threads together through reclaimed land, river basin ecosystems, inland mines and human and more-than-human communities. The aim is to establish a reflexive framework for architecture towards a paradigm shift in the value system: what does it mean to build today, at a time of ecological crisis and intensified social injustice? The method is close reading of the accounts of people, life forms, matter and the built environment.’

Read more about Cyan’s award here.

Image: Post-extraction landscape, Shigushan village, Wuhan, China, 2022. Photographed by Chen Zhan.