Recollections from the Information Session held on March 9, 2023
Each year, the AWAF awards a mid-career fellowship to a woman who has practiced in the design field for a minimum of five years in California. The awardee pursues a research or design project of her choosing, with funding to aid the research process, outreach, and dissemination of project materials to a broader audience. The award year culminates with a presentation at the annual AWA+D Spring Symposium.
To spur the momentum for this year’s applications, open until April 28, 2023, the Awards Committee recently hosted a ‘Fellowship 101: Mid-Career Professional Development Information Session’. Set up as a Q&A-style roundtable discussion, the event invited past winners to share their experiences on how they did it. From conceptualizing the idea to organizing a project for the application or making time outside of daily obligations to maintaining time and energy for passions and interests, the event provided several key takeaways and insights for prospective and future applicants.
The session’s Q&A allowed interested applicants to listen in on real-life, candid takeaways, and retrospective thoughts from lived and tried experiences with the fellowship process and opportunity. If you are interested in applying for this year’s AWAF Fellowship, please consider the following advice and accept the open invitation to apply. AWAF, as a non-profit organization, strives to build professional and personal growth through the annual Fellowship.
Here are some key insights from the Q&A session:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for your project and application materials?
A (Melissa Anderson): My main question for the fellowship application was: can 3D printing be affordable? I work in single-family residential architecture, and the price per square foot is incredibly high. I began to question how the standard moving forward could impact positive change. I was working with somebody that was really interested in using the technology to build something, but we found it difficult to find precedents to provide clients the confidence to invest in a long-term design solution. My goal was to be able to teach other architects, clients, and the design community how to use 3D printing technology and apply it to projects.
A (Anna Neimark): My fellowship year was in 2021, during COVID, which as we all know, was a special time. I was interested in being able to work outside of normal daily routines, and one of the things I was doing was trying to develop smaller exhibition projects. I was practicing and teaching at Sci-Arc – and when I was applying for the fellowship, I was in the middle of a project with the Museum of Toulouse (France). We brought multiple prints of the megalithic dome and monuments to Los Angeles, and I wanted to understand how to translate these 6000-year-old structures into contemporary construction techniques. I began to imagine the project as an office project as well as an exhibition project. The fellowship allowed me the time to expand on my writing. My main question for the exhibition was: how do we contextualize this within historical research as well as in a pedagogical space? During COVID, there wasn’t much we could do in the field, such as photograph the sites and subjects, but we could write about it.
A (Ashley Margo): My formal education is in architecture, but I’ve worked between the AEC entertainment and education industries. I’m a multimedia designer with a focus in graphic design. In 2016, I started noticing places around the city that made me realize “I should have been there.” These places weren’t on my route, and I didn’t have a reason to go there. I proposed to a group of friends to pick out a particular color. From that color, I would take them on a surprise tour of the city. Between 2016 and 2019, I went on 15 different tours around Los Angeles, each one specifically designed for the guest in mind. I didn’t have an end goal; it was just about getting to know Los Angeles in a different way. When the opportunity arose to apply for the AWAF Fellowship, I had a few ideas about what the project would turn in to. Ultimately, each of the tours ended up in a separate color ribbon, along with an associated map for each one. This fellowship was important for me because I fell between a few different industries, so to have a professional organization that is well respected, and as a platform to share the project, was truly meaningful.
A (Audrey Sato): For my fellowship project, I proposed a podcast where I would interview women around Los Angeles. I was interested in speaking with women who I saw as being successful, to try and find out more about them. This was important to me, because as a solo practitioner, and having worked in firms in a male-dominated environment, it was critical for me to understand what the different paths were and the different types of leadership that existed.
A (Janica Baker): The project was called 1200 Play Yards. We (myself and Caitlin, my project partner) were working with a very large client, LAUSD, and they had this wonderful ambition of master planning their sites, bringing new facilities to their students, dreaming of what could become of their aging spaces, aging infrastructure. Along the way, we would present ideas that has to be tucked away in a little box because they simply weren’t feasible. We were wondering how we could push the envelope more, and when the fellowship opportunity came up, we thought we could make a thesis for ourselves. I was out of school for six years, and at that point, I didn’t want to have boundaries anymore. For us, the fellowship was a way to explore ideas for a year – the work became a chapter in both of our books. The fellowship let us play!
Q: How did your project evolve beyond the Fellowship year? Are you still working on the same project, or has it sparked a new idea?
A (Anna Neimark): I was able to publish an essay that came out in a book edited by Michael Hays and Andrew Holder at the Harvard University Press. In ‘Inscriptions Architecture, Before Speech,’ they published the photographs we took as part of the fellowship, with specific texts that provided context. There was another set of images in an edited volume by Viola Algo, who also helped publish this project in AD Magazine.
Following that, we were able to take the exhibition back into practice. Christopher Hawthorne initiated a project where we made this project part of the standard ADU program here in Los Angeles. This project lives on as something I’m able to teach at Sci-Arc as part of the pedagogy and continue to work with in the office. I thought this would be a short-term project, but it turned into a longer effort that allowed me to take it in multiple directions.
A (Ashley Margo): Since completing the project, I won a design award from the Architecture and Design Museum, and I have continued to experiment with different forms of representation. I imagine there will be a longer life to this project, but time will tell where it goes.
A (Audrey Sato): The project lived on for quite a few years. I published a couple episodes last year, and it’s on pause right now because I had a child. So, right now it’s on pause, but the podcasts are still available online.
Q: What was difficult about the application process?
A (Melissa Anderson): In retrospect, I wish I had a partner for this project. With work becoming very intense, sometimes I find it difficult to manage both commitments. It would be interesting to split the idea generation and project process between design and project management, and research and experimentation.
Q: Do you have any advice on how to create a project budget?
A (Anna Neimark): When you think about the budget, think of things that are not usually covered by clients – translation fees, copyrights, fees (especially for publishing), exhibition costs, insurance costs, photography, rendering, etc. With a good set of allocations within the budget, there are many ways in which the quality of the work rises. Architects tend to do things themselves, in-house, so it can be helpful to use fellowship funds to outsource some important process elements to make your workflow more efficient. The moment we start collaborating and working with professionals and fabricators, our process becomes more dynamic.
Q: How can one go about asking for recommendation letters? Did you find it useful in your application process?
A (Melissa Anderson): The process of asking for recommendation letters was important for me. Because it was the first time I was sharing this project with people that were outside of my friend group, it was helpful to hear their initial thoughts and gave me motivation to move forward with the application. I found it useful because those people are still on the journey with me, they check in periodically, and they have invested time and energy into my project.
Q: Does the fellowship offer awardees a chance to learn from other mentors’ experiences doing similar projects? What are the mentorship opportunities while doing the fellowship?
A (Megan Horn): Yes, you get paired up with members of the board to check in and ideate with. They might not be directly aligned with your field, but it still provides the value of bouncing your ideas off someone else and keeping the pace of your project intact and moving forward.
For the full Event Recording: