Peter Reyner Banham Fellow
Eva Franch-Gilabert
Eva Franch Gilabert has been appointed as the 2007 Banham Fellow. Eva studied at TU Delft, at ETS Arquitectura Barcelona where she received her Diploma in Architecture with Honors in 2003 and at Princeton University where she received the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize and her M.Arch II degree in 2007. Franch’s work draws on cultural, political, social, technological and formal archeologies in addressing the contemporary need for local desires and global understandings. Her research in architecture focuses on the search of representation of collective aspiration through conceptual, ideological and formal constructions of meaning through doubt. Her current research at Buffalo -- “Architecture of doubt” focuses in three operative fields: utopias (historic), metaphors (formal-cognoscitive) and atmospheres (experiential). “Utopia as doubt” is a research seminar that intends to identify and redefine the limits of utopia, histories, stories and projects of the twentieth century in order to construct possible pasts, and simultaneously possible futures. Parallel to the composite figure of utopia, “Generative metaphors” is a research on banality and the production and conceptualization of architecture that imply a turn from a rhetoric of representation to a hermeneutic of generation. Finally, “goose bumps” or the architecture of effect, is a research on the (im)Possibilities of discourse and representation of atmospheres in architectural practice. Franch’s work has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture in New York, Korean Institute of Architects in Daegu, FAD Barcelona, NAI Rotterdam, Shenzen Biennale of Architecture, SOA Princeton, COAR Rioja and ETSA Barcelona among others. Selected publications include “CityThemeCity” and “Content_A” in Pidgin, “Dementia” in Postboks, “Pause Pavillion” in Pasajes, “Generative metaphors” in Sources of architectural form, and “R.E.D. studies” in Imagined Spaces. Awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship 2006 by Princeton University, Franch also received the La Caixa 2005-2007 full fellowship in residence for postgraduate studies, the Incubadora del FAD prize for emerging architects 2007, a Pasajes-iGuzzini prize, a Dragados Foundation prize and the Erasmus Fellowship among others. She is a registered architect in Catalonia.
Previous Banham Fellows
- 2006-07 Sergio López-Piñeiro
- 2005-06 Jonathan Solomon
- 2004-05 Hilary Sample
- 2003-04 Grace Ong
- 2002-03 Donald Kunze
- 2001-02 Tsz Yan Ng
- 2000-01 Hugo Dworzak
Peter Reyner Banham (SUNY-Buffalo, 1976-80) produced a foundational body of scholarship on material/visual culture as a reflection of contemporary social life. The Banham Fellowship in Architecture is intended to support design work that situates architecture within the general field of socio-cultural and material critique.
