CCA-WRI Research Fellowship Program

The CCA-WRI fellowship programme, launched by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Windows Research Institute (WRI), is open to accomplished professionals who hold a doctoral degree or have substantial work experience and a commitment to publishing, exhibiting, and/or professional practice.

The programme offers a residency at the CCA for one to three months between July and October, during which fellows will address a research theme that explores the relationships between current societal issues and architecture based on the CCA collection. Each fellow will have a private office and receive monthly stipends and additional financial support for travel expenses.

In 2022 the programme is themed ‘Above/Below/Between: Light on a Damaged Planet’, under which it will seek to understand architecture’s varied relationships to the changing material constitution of the light spectrum. Applications are welcomed that address the following topics, as well as those that take the theme in new directions:

• The relationships between natural resources and the built environment.
• New understandings of ‘sustainability’ that include degrowth.
• Architectural responses to global warming that privilege heating, cooling, and the management of light.
• Historically and geographically specific typologies, from telescopes to factory floors, reliant on natural light.
• Landscape projects that respond to precise and immediate forms of environmental damage and pollution.
• Future-oriented understandings of design in the Anthropocene.
• New relationships between humans and their surrounding ecosystems.
• New relationships between non-humans and their surrounding ecosystems.
• Interrogations of the material and political parameters of ‘green building’.
• Solar radiation as an architectural material.
• Social patterns in the built environment that privilege the use of underground spaces.