The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Sanjana Lahiri and Kevin Chow, both AR’22, have received the 2021 Robert L. Wesley Award from the SOM Foundation. Named in honor of the first Black partner at SOM, the award supports BIPOC undergraduate students enrolled in architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, urban design, or engineering programs in the United States. 

Dean Tehrani notes “It gives me great pleasure to see that Sanjana and Kevin’s hard work has been recognized by the SOM Foundation. The Robert S. Wesley award goes to young designers and scholars of significant ambition, and both of these students have successfully brought their design interests and scholarship into meaningful confluence. With a sophistication of thought and eloquence of communication, both have led critical discussions within this school for some time. I trust that this award might serve both as a great launching pad for further research, perchance for graduate studies and far beyond.”

Lahiri, an Indian architecture student from Singapore, is the co-founder of Cooper Union’s Architecture Lobby Chapter and a member of the Cooper Climate Coalition, a student-led group advocating for climate action across the institution. She has also curated Cooper’s Student Lecture Series. 

“Architecture’s position in the world remains, for me, a source of discomfort, and my biggest challenge over the past four and a half years has been to negotiate my proximity to the discipline,” notes Lahiri. “I hope to use funding from the Robert L. Wesley award to continue along the vein of curation, project facilitation, and counter-curricula that I have begun during my time at Cooper, and to facilitate initiatives around climate action in spaces of higher education.” Lahiri’s Thesis project, currently in progress, engages New York City’s community gardens as simultaneous sites of resistance and tools of the real estate economy.

Chow is a corecipient of the 2021 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for research supporting his exhibition Pastoral Silicon Valley: A Landscape of Quiet Crisis, which examines his hometown and will open in February 2022. Of his plans for the SOM award, Chow states "I think I will be staying within academia for a while, not because it is the perfect model, but because I have a respect for schools as institutions of advancement and generosity. What this means is not only that I will pursue higher degrees, but also that I am thinking about what a more perfect, more nimble institution might look like. To that end, this grant will help me develop such a thing, through education, research, and other projects. The Robert L. Wesley Award from the SOM Foundation serves as the strongest possible ward on the long journey ahead."

Chow’s research is primarily focused on technocracy; his Thesis project is framed as an illustrated screenplay inhabiting scenes from an endgame society of post-leisure, one which has fulfilled the promises of technology as progress. Accordingly, he is an amateur writer and artist, disguised as a preprofessional architect.

The 2021 Robert L. Wesley Award
Alexander Htet Aung Kyaw (Cornell University), Sanjana Lahiri (The Cooper Union), and Xiluva Mbungela (Syracuse University) will each receive a $10,000 award in addition to a yearlong mentorship program that connects the students with leading BIPOC practitioners and educators. In 2021 the jury decided to expand the number of fellows to include two additional $5,000 awards, given to Kevin Chow (The Cooper Union) and Viridiana Hernandez Sevilla (University of Oklahoma).

This 2021 jury was led by Robert L. Wesley and included Danei Cesario, Chris Cornelius, Joyce Hwang, and María Villalobos Hernandez. 

About the SOM Foundation
Founded in 1979, the SOM Foundation’s goal is to advance the design profession’s ability to address the key topics of our time by bringing together and supporting groups and individuals, each with the highest possible design aspirations. The Foundation’s award programming was established in 1981 and currently offers five annual awards across the United States, Europe, and China. The awards support students and faculty of architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, urban design, and engineering to undertake rigorous interdisciplinary research that can help shape our future.