2026 STUDENT TRAVEL FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS

The School of Architecture congratulates the recipients of the 2026 Student Travel Fellowships for their pursuit of advanced scholarship in design studies. These awards support nine independent research projects across a dozen countries.  

Carmen FANZONE TRAVEL AWARD
roshni ahuja (BS Arch + BA Astronomy '27)

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Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps. Photo: Wilfredo Rafael Rodriguez Hernandez, Wikimedia Commons

The Carmen Fanzone Travel Award supports summer independent research travel with a focus on indigenous materials, local construction methods, and fabrication practices.

Roshni Ahuja’s proposal, Folklore as a Foundation for Architectural Resilience, advances this mission through research travel to Germany, examining how storytelling, myth, and cultural narrative are embedded within architectural form, material systems, and landscape—and how these narratives foster ecological and social resilience over time. Through site studies ranging from Neuschwanstein Castle and the medieval towns along the Romantic Road to Cologne Cathedral and the literary city of Heidelberg, the research traces how narrative informs construction decisions at every scale—from siting and structural systems to material selection and spatial sequencing. Using observational drawing, material and façade analysis, archival research, photography, and interviews, Ahuja will document how stories are not merely decorative but integrally embedded within the tectonic and structural logic of buildings and landscapes.

SUSAN NELSON FLEISS TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIP
noah Stengel-eskin (BS ARCH '27)

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Swakomund Jetty, Namibia. Photo: Olga Ernst & Hp.Baumeler, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Susan Nelson Fleiss Endowed Scholarship supports travel domestically or internationally for the purpose of research, design or personal development.

2026 Nelson Fleiss Travel Scholar Noah Stengel-Eskin will explore sustainable and ethical hospitality architecture in Namibia, focusing on how indigenous construction methods, environmental responsiveness, and community engagement shape built environments in a tourism-driven economy. Grounded in his interest in hospitality design and culturally conscious design practice, the research supports his long-term goal of founding a network of ethically run, locally rooted hotels. Stengel-Eskin will visit and document Omaanda, Sonop, Swakopmund, Windhoek, and Dead Valley Lodge, to study how contemporary hospitality projects adapt vernacular techniques to harsh climates and sensitive landscapes. 

BENJAMIN C. HOWLAND TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP

Lindsey Messer (MLA '27) 
Michael John Minutoli (MLA '27)

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Sites of respective research for the 2026 Howland Travel Fellows Lindsey Messer and MJ Minutoli (left–right): Tuinpark Ons Buiten in Amsterdam (illustrated site plan courtesy of Tuinpark Ons Buiten) and Prospect Cottage in coastal England—home of the late gardener and queer filmmaker Derek Jarman (photo: Ron Strutt, CC BY-SA 2.0).

The Howland Travel Fellowship supports focused research investigation and documentation of landscape or place, especially related to issues in the public realm. In 2026, the fellowship was awarded to two graduate landscape architecture students, Lindsey Messer and Michael John (MJ) Minutoli. 

This summer, Lindsey Messer will investigate how semi-private landscapes, specifically allotment gardens, can function as extensions of public space through governance and shared maintenance. Her project examines allotment parks in Amsterdam and Berlin with differing regulations, maintenance requirements, and public amenities. By comparing parks with varying bylaws and priorities, this research analyzes how governance structures and maintenance responsibilities shape public access, use, and perception. Messer's study frames allotment parks as hybrid landscapes where stewardship practices produce unique and varied public spaces that would not otherwise be able to exist. 

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How does narrative shape a landscape and offer freedom to a community forced to hide its pleasure? Through his practice of writing screenplays and his forthcoming summer research travels, MJ Minutoli will visit sites across England, France, Germany, and Italy that carry answers to this question—gardens, villas, and landscapes historically shaped as spaces of queer refuge, intimacy, and self-determination. By reframing the “closet” as a designed spatial condition rather than solely a social metaphor, the project examines how narrative, concealment, and pleasure are embedded in landscape form. Through on-site drawing, diagramming, photography, and the creation of an artist-made tunnel book, Minutoli will archive these environments as narrative sets that inform future cinematic worlds and landscape practice, culminating in a lexicon of queer pleasure landscapes that elevates representation and foregrounds the role of emotion, pleasure, and storytelling in design.

SARAH MCARTHUR NIX TRAVELing FELLOWship
chloe kikstra (M.Arch '27)

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The reception building and west façade of the Musée de Cluny in Paris form part of a comprehensive renovation led by architect Bernard Desmoulin, completed in 2022. The contemporary addition unifies the museum’s ancient, medieval, and 19th-century structures while improving circulation, accessibility, and spatial continuity across the historic complex. Photo: Musée de Cluny

The Nix fellowship supports independent summer study in France. 

Building on prior research, Chloe Kikstra will examine museum extensions as responses to time, history, and context, with a focused investigation into materiality, spatial logic, and the emotional relationship between art and architecture. The Nix Fellowship will support in-depth study of contemporary extensions to historic museums in France—specifically projects by architect Bernard Desmoulin at the Musée de Cluny in Paris and the Centre Tignous d’Art Contemporain in Montreuil. Through hand-drawn plans, sections, perspectives, and detailed studies of material junctions, Kikstra's research will analyze how modern interventions can clarify, contrast with, and complement historic fabric. The project will culminate in a site-specific extension proposal for the ruins of the Abbey of Saint-Evroult, conceived not as reconstruction but as architectural continuation.

CARLO PELLICCIA TRAVELing FELLOWship

Trevor Valletta (BS Arch + BA Italian '27)

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Historic buildings in San Lorenzo, Rome. Photo: Gianni Dominici, CC BY-ND 2.0

2026 Pelliccia Travel Fellow Trevor Valletta will advance an architectural investigation into riposo—Italy’s tradition of midday rest—as a designed spatial condition rather than solely a cultural practice. Centered in Rome, the research examines how architecture mediates time, rest, and human biology amid pressures from tourism, climate intensification, and continuous productivity. Through real-time observation, mapping of building operations, and detailed documentation of architectural elements such as shutters, awnings, thresholds, courtyards, and material assemblies, the project analyzes how rest is preserved, transformed, or eroded across historic and contemporary urban contexts. By treating architecture as a form of spatial resistance to perpetual activity, the study reframes rest as a fundamental design concern with relevance beyond Italy, contributing to broader conversations on wellness, human-centered urbanism, and the role of the built environment in protecting essential rhythms of daily life.

The Carlo Pelliccia Travel Fellowship supports an independent study abroad, primarily located in Italy. 

JOEL A. ZACK TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP

Amanda Benwire (M.ArH '27)
Nicholas Ching (BS ARCH + B.ArH '27)
Cole Evans (BS Arch '27)

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Sites of respective research for the 2026 Zack Travel Fellows Amanda Benwire, Nicholas Ching, and Cole Evans (left–right): Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports is an abandoned Brutalist indoor arena in Vilnius, Lithuania, now listed as a protected cultural heritage site (photo: Trevor Pritchard, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); Shophouse Row in George Town, Malaysia (photo: Barbara Weibel); Forest City in Johor, Malaysia is a $100 billion speculative development project that has failed to attract residents (photo: Angys, CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Joel A. Zack (JAZ) Travel Fellowship supports extended international travel for School of Architecture students pursuing original, site-based research driven by deep personal curiosity and a commitment to global and community understanding. In its inaugural year, the 2026 Zack Fellowship was awarded to three students, Amanda Benwire, Nicholas Ching, and Cole Evans. 

Amanda Benwire’s summer fieldwork and Lithuanian language study will advance her architectural-historical exploration of urban memory, heritage, and identity in post-war and post-1989 Lithuania. Framing Lithuanian cities as urban palimpsests, the research examines how layers of construction, erasure, and reinterpretation reveal the afterlives of displacement and shifting political regimes, with focused case studies including the Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports, the former Great Synagogue, Reformation Park, and Grūtas Park. Combining site-based documentation, archival research, and language training essential for engaging primary sources, the project explores how Jewish, Polish, and Lithuanian histories are preserved, muted, or reimagined within contemporary urban space. Grounded in both personal heritage and academic training in architectural history, the research contributes to broader discussions on post-Soviet transformation, contested heritage, and the politics of memory, while laying the foundation for future scholarly work on urban memory in Eastern Europe and other post-authoritarian contexts.

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Nicholas Ching’s travel research, Tracing Typologies: Shophouses of Southeast Asia, investigates the shophouse as a resilient mixed-use building type shaped by maritime trade, diasporic settlement, and urban densification. Through extended travel to Singapore, Melaka, George Town, Bangkok, and Hanoi, the project examines how this narrow, deep typology—integrating commerce and residence—has continuously adapted to shifting economic systems, development pressures, and preservation regimes. Using on-site observational drawing, sectional analysis, façade documentation, photography, and model-making, the research will trace the internal spatial logic, material strategies, and urban relationships that allow shophouses to persist through mutation rather than stasis. Grounded in both academic training and personal familial history within the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, Ching's project reframes the shophouse not as a static heritage artifact but as an evolving urban precedent.

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Cole Evans's research will respond to the question: why do large-scale speculative urban megaprojects often fail to develop into fully populated, functioning cities, and how might these stalled environments be reimagined? Using Forest City and Melaka Gateway in Malaysia and Ocean Flower Island in China as primary case studies, the research analyzes speculative planned urbanism through architectural, planning, real estate, and geopolitical lenses, including density, public–private space ratios, phasing strategies, branding narratives, and lived reality. Through extensive on-site documentation, interviews, spatial mapping, and comparative analysis with successful counterexamples such as Sentosa Island in Singapore, the project seeks to identify the conditions that distinguish resilient planned urbanism from speculative overreach. Supplemented by participation in the Urban Land Institute Asia Pacific Summit, Evans's research aims to generate strategies for adapting underutilized megadevelopments into viable communities, directly informing Evans’s fourth-year thesis and future professional work in international planning and development.