“Architecture cannot inhibit the market… But for a moment in history, the Connecticut Hospice sincerely attempted to spatially manifest its ambition to yoke the well-being of patients to the well-being of staff, weaving together the fates of two populations commonly cast aside by the state and by capital…”

Clare Fentress (Yale University) revisits a now-deserted hospice center in Connecticut that was unprecedented for how it distributed care to all users. Her first prize essay, “Staff Needs: The Spaces of Hospice,” attends to the center’s architectures, newly advocating for both hospice patients and workers amid the contemporary devaluation of healthcare.

“As a colonial apparatus, the camera circulated back images of destruction from a very specific point of view. The two archival images, exterior and interior, of Sikandar Bagh were both shot from the direction from which the colonial forces advanced; they do not look the other way to frame the views the revolutionaries would have seen. The colonial gaze is embedded in how these spaces were captured across mediums.”

Yakin Ajay Kinger (CEPT University) re-examines the “ruined and dried-up landscapes” of India’s baghs from pre-revolution to present day, tracing “their physical transformations and their imagined ones.” His second prize essay critiques the various media and archives recording a colonial historiography, instead opening up space for other life and lives to emerge.

“In a sense, the Ring Road has made certain citizens and certain forms of life hyper-visible as a threat to the country’s civilizing mission. The drive to ‘free’ Cairo from this ‘informality’ has, however, destroyed many of the social and economic structures that maintain the city itself.”

Mariam Aref Mahmoud (Columbia University) unravels the development of neoliberal and global forces at work along Cairo’s Ring Road. Her second prize essay reviews Egypt’s modernization schemes across its political regimes, exposing the making of a housing crisis that continues to displace working-class communities.

“… the experiment became a new form of exhibition, an object map of national power within a highly ordered and governed landscape—albeit one that has been left outdoors to gradually crumble.”

Sonia Sobrino Ralston (Harvard University) inspects the Stone Exposure Test Wall at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland. Her second prize essay reveals the latent and layered histories of US extraction and empire lodged within the wall, exposing the absurdity of scientific attempts at securing architecture’s use and value.