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Arcus Program/Recipients: 2007-08 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002

The Arcus Endowment at the College of Environmental Design is pleased to announce the results of its 2003 Awards Program. Six awards of up to $5,000 each were given to support critical activity exploring the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. The successful applicants addressed one of three award themes:

• Transforming design education and professional practice: Awards will be made to support critical initiatives that recognize or enable the activities of the LGBTQ community in design education and professional practice. Funding is available for awareness seminars, teach-ins, educational pamphlets and posters that combat homophobia and foster role models for emerging practitioners and educators. Requests will also be considered to fund research into innovative forms of practice and pedagogy.
   
• Supporting critical initiatives in design: Awards will be made to support design research by students or practicing professionals that addresses the relationship between LGBTQ issues and the built environment. Submissions may take the form of critical writing, speculative design inquiry or actual commissions, and range in scale from furniture design to landscape architecture and urban planning proposals. Requests for funds to support creative initiatives in public policy and planning guidelines will also be considered.
   
• Mapping histories of queer space: Awards will be made to support research into the histories of queer communities and related urban/architectural spaces, including (but not limited to) urban and/or architectural histories of the emergence and transformation of LGBTQ neighborhoods, community centers, sites of protest and memory; histories of queers in education and/or professional practice; changing conceptions of queer public and private spaces and their relationship to queer identities.
   

2003 Arcus Endowment Award Winners

Lisa C. Henry Benham and Cecilia Haydee Uriburu
Lisa C. Henry Benham, an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and Cecilia Haydee Uriburu, a graduate of the Master of Architecture program at Utah, were named Arcus Endowment Visiting Critics for the 2003–2004 academic year. They collaborated with Queers in Space and the GLBT Society of Northern California to develop preliminary design proposals for the International Museum of GLBT History.

Lawrence Cohen
Lawrence Cohen, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and South and South East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, used Arcus funds to explore the development of "Kohti culture" as a result of the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic in India. Experts and activist use the "Kohti concept" to refer to "feminized" men who consider themselves to be women or like women, and are often involved in sex work. The research aimed to trace the emergence of the Kohti concept in newly established public health categories, as well as explore its impact on the HIV/AIDS discourses and practices of governmental and non-governmental organizations. Cohen undertook a close ethnographic analysis of the spaces of Kohti identification and disidentification in the cities of Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi. He focused on the spatialization of the Kohti category, as well as the impact of mapping itself, a central technology of AIDS governance.

Jason Lem, an undergraduate from the University of Toronto, examined the cultural history of marginalized queer communities in Toronto, Canada. His study considered the reactions and experiences of three activist groups to the HIV /AIDS epidemic. Lem aimed to develop an interdisciplinary critical framework to explore how political strategies have varied in relation to specific racialized communities. He situated local examples in a global framework that acknowledged the influence of global migration and diaspora on AIDS and AIDS activism.

Michael Brown and Larry Knopp
Michael Brown and Larry Knopp were volunteer coordinators at the Northwest Lesbian and Gay Historic Museum Project. Arcus funds were used to update and further develop documentation of the historic landscape of sexual minorities in the Pacific Northwest. Their goal was to design and produce a revised version of the group’s walking guide to the GLBT history of Seattle. The project involved collecting information, maintaining a GIS database, and updating the original guide to show the long-standing presence of queers in the city from 1920 to the present. The building of a GIS-based archival system will insure the speed and simplicity of future cartographic updates.

Pina Petricone
Pina Petricone is a principal in Giannone Associates Architects in Toronto, Canada. She examined the role of the inner-city single family home in identity formation, and proposed interventions in relation to specific contexts that addressed the findings of her research. Petricone's speculative design research explored how time-tested domestic architectures can be redefined to support constantly changing "fugitive identities." Set in Toronto's Church Street (LGBTQ) district, Petricone's study involved a combination of writing, drawings, and models. The results were made public, and used to inform her teaching.

QIS (Queers in Space)
QIS is the queer student organization in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. They coordinated design workshops and seminars that sought  to understand and support the activities of queers in the design professions. Their goal was to develop long-term working and exploration methods to foster creativity, visibility, and community, while engaging the school and wider community in their activities. As part of this mandate, Queers in Space launched a collaboration with the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California to develop initial design ideas for the International Museum of GLBT History in San Francisco.

2003 Arcus Endowment Lecture

Joel Sanders, Assistant Professor of Architecture at Yale University and principal of Joel Sanders Architect, New York, New York, gave the first Arcus Endowment Annual Lecture, entitled "Ergotectonics: Multi-identity Environments."

2003 Arcus Endowment Advisory Board

Steve Bennett
Attorney and Activist, West Hollywood, California

Gary R. Brown
Architect, Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Assistant Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley

Beatriz Colomina
Professor of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Roddy Creedon
Architect, San Francisco, and Adjunct Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Greig Crysler
Program Director, Arcus Endowment, Assistant Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Carolyn Dinshaw
Executive Director, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University, New York, New York

Harrison Fraker
Dean and William Wurster Professor, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley

Joe Garrett
Writer, Kensington, California

Robert Alexander González
Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Tulane University, and the founding editor of Aula: Architecture & Urbanism is Las Americas

Paul Groth
Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Hal Hayes
Architect, New York, New York

Frederick Hertz
Attorney and Activist, Oakland, California

Ralph Hexter
Dean of Arts and Humanities, College of Letters and Science, UC Berkeley

Kevin Howley
Private Sector Executive, Blue Bell, Pennsylvania

Patti Intrieri
Architect, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Eric Jirgens
Interior Designer, Birmingham, Michigan

Caren Kaplan
Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Women's Studies, UC Berkeley

Kate Kendell
Executive Director, National Center for Lesbian Rights, San Francisco, California

Moira Kenney
Urban Planner and Author, Berkeley, California

Reed Kroloff
Editor-in-Chief, Architecture Magazine, New York, New York

Waverly B. Lowell
Curator, College of Environmental Design Archives, UC Berkeley

Michael Lucey
Associate Professor, Departments of French and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Stanley Saitowitz
Architect, San Francisco, and Professor of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Jorge Silvetti
Chair, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jon Stryker
Founder and President, Arcus Foundation, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Susan Stryker
Executive Director, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society of Northern California, San Francisco, California

Henry Urbach
Independent Scholar, Gallery Owner and Architect, New York, New York

Gabriel Wick
M.L.A. Student, Queers in Environmental Design Representative, UC Berkeley