Society of Architectural Historians Announces 2018 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellows

The Society of Architectural Historians has named architect Aymar Mariño-Maza and architectural historian Zachary J. Violette as the recipients of the 2018 H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellowship. The fellowship allows an emerging scholar to travel the world to experience architecture and landscapes firsthand. SAH awarded Mariño-Maza a one-year fellowship and Violette a short-term fellowship for three months of travel. They will begin their fellowship travels in March 2019 and will document their field studies through monthly updates on the SAH Blog.

Mariño-Maza hopes to bridge the gap between architecture and anthropology through an ethnographic study of architecture’s role in defining the identity of displaced communities. She plans to visit sites in Greece, Israel, Turkey, Germany, England, Spain and Morocco, countries embedded with a rich history of displaced communities.

“This fellowship will grant me the unique opportunity to conduct a field study of the long-term consequences of displacement,” said Mariño-Maza. “My long-term goal is to gain the necessary knowledge base to more effectively provoke change in the way architecture is deployed in the field of development.”

Mariño-Maza’s research was inspired by her work as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), where she investigated alternative solutions to the reallocation of informal settlements for displaced people in Cartagena, Colombia. She intends to use the fellowship to study architecture through the lens of anthropology and see firsthand the way in which people inhabit and appropriate architectural space.

Mariño-Maza received her B.Arch. from Cornell University in 2015 and her M.Arch. II from Yale University in 2017. She currently works at the Chicago firm HBRA Architects.

Violette’s field study will encompass the landscapes of nineteenth and early twentieth century industrialization and modernization, with a focus on residential building types. His travel itinerary will include cities throughout central and eastern Europe, such as Berlin, Lodz, Warsaw, Kiev, Bucharest, Vienna and Prague. He sees the fellowship as an opportunity to advance his academic research, teaching, and writing, as well as broaden his understanding of cross-cultural contexts.

“Many of the areas covered by my proposed route of travel, I believe, exerted a strong but poorly understood influence on American architectural forms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly Berlin and Vienna,” said Violette. “This study trip will be key to shaping my understanding of the urban landscape and the new and varying architectural forms it produced.”

Violette earned his Ph.D. in American and New England Studies from Boston University in 2014. He is currently researching and writing a follow-up volume to his forthcoming book, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age, for which he was awarded an SAH/Mellon Author Award in 2017.

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