CED - College of Environmental Design, Berkeley

2004 Arcus Awards Program

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

Arcus Lecture: Henry Urbach Architecture; Art Basel Miami Beach, 2003

The 2004 Arcus awards program distributed awards of up to $5,000 each to five recipients for projects that addressed one of the following topics:

Exploring Domestic Arrangements. The Arcus Endowment seeks to foster design activity and research that examines diverse definitions of home and family. Awards will be made for studies or proposals that explore innovative arrangements for same-sex couples (with or without children), extended and/or non-traditional families, and other forms of collective living environments that present alternatives to the spaces and cultures of the heterosexual nuclear family. Cross-cultural and historical investigations are encouraged. Built works of outstanding merit may also be submitted to the Arcus Endowment for recognition of design excellence.
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.

2004 Award Recipients

Jess Wendover and Sam Zimmerman
Jesse Wendover and Sam Zimmerman explored land use and urban design policies related to the development of LGBTQ neighborhoods in North America. Their research sought to find the best approaches to meet the social and spatial needs of urban LGBTQ communities, while also promoting a dialogue between community activists and policy makers. The research drew on the Eastlake community in Lake Merritt as their primary case study.
Christopher Roebuck
A graduate student in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley, Christopher Roebuck undertook a spatial analysis of kinship practices among transgender woman in San Francisco. Roebuck explored how members of the transgender community developed a sense of belonging in the areas where they lived by studying single-residency occupancy hotels, local bars, and their surrounding communities.
Marlon Bailey
Marlon Bailey, a graduate student in African-American studies at UC Berkeley, studied ballroom performance in Detroit, Michigan, as an integral part of Black and Latino queer culture. His research centered on the ballroom “mothers and fathers” and forms of ballroom kinship that presented alternative models to dominant understandings of “home” and “family.”
GLBT Historical Society of Northern California
The GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco used its Arcus funds to embark on a multi-stage educational project to map historic queer spaces in San Francisco. The project sought to enable visitors and tourists to interact with the GLBTQ landmarks and popular spaces that have transformed the San Francisco cityscape. The research drew upon the extensive archival resources of the GLBT Society, and aimed at developing a narrative map that could be distributed widely to visitors to San Francisco and other relevant groups and individuals.
The Tides Center
The National AIDS Memorial Grove, a project of the Tides Center of San Francisco, began as a national competition for a new AIDS memorial to be added to the site of the existing memorial grove in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The organizers received funds from Arcus to hold a panel discussion and exhibition related to the competition at UC Berkeley. The panel discussion, entitled “The Importance of Remembering,” was held as part of the Department of Architecture’s Spring 2005 Lecture Series. The exhibition consisted of the 12 competition finalists (including the winning entry).

2004 Arcus Endowment Lecture

The 2004 lecture was given by Arcus advisory board member Henry Urbach. The lecture was entitled "Recent Work (and other appropriations)." Henry founded Henry Urbach Architecture, a New York gallery of contemporary art and architecture, in 1997 after completing master's degrees in architecture and history and theory of architecture at Columbia University and Princeton University, respectively. The gallery was established to create a forum where contemporary art and experimental architecture could find a significant and sustained dialogue. Henry has taught at Parsons School of Design and other schools in the New York area, and he has written about architecture for many exhibition catalogues, books, and journals, including the New York Times, ANY, Assemblage, and Artforum.

2004 Arcus Endowment Advisory Board

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

Gail Dubrow
Professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, at Seattle

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

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

Gretchen Till
M. Arch Student, Queers in Environmental Design Representative, UC Berkeley