We are excited to welcome Piergianna Mazzocca, Ajay Manthripragada, and Dr. Sebastian Schmidt.
Ajay Manthripragada - 2017 Wortham Fellow
Prior to coming to Rice, Ajay Manthripragada taught core and advanced design studios at UC Berkeley, where he also directed the post-baccalaureate program in architecture from 2014-2016. He has been an invited guest critic at Cornell and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Manthripragada holds a Bachelor of Arts from UC Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from Princeton. He worked in various architecture firms in Paris, New York and San Francisco before founding his own studio in 2014. The office has completed work on a number of small projects since its inception, including a new house and art gallery in Berkeley.
In practice and in teaching, Manthripragada focuses on the tension between conceptual autonomy and contextual specificity. His Wortham Fellowship research considers the role of reference in design and its encounter with the particulars of a project, aiming to theorize a contemporary approach to the use of examples in architectural production.
Piergianna Mazzocca - 2017 Wortham Fellow.
Piergianna Mazzocca graduated as an architect from the University of the Andes in Mérida-Venezuela, after which she cofounded and worked as an architect in Taller de Arquitectura Singular, directing the office between 2011 and 2015. In 2014 she moved to the Netherlands to start her post masters at The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, Delft University of Technology, from where she graduated cum laude in February 2016. She has practiced architecture in her home country, Rotterdam, and Milan.
Piergianna’s current research focuses in architecture’s enduring relationship to health and its associated medical aesthetic paradigms.
Dr. Sebastian Schmidt - 2017 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow.
Sebastian Schmidt graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture. He is a historian of urbanism and architecture working on issues of war, race, and memory in cities in the 20th century, with a focus on the United States, Germany, and Japan during and after WWII. Schmidt is currently working on a book manuscript that expands on the research done for his dissertation. His project positions the global and racial nature of WWII as a shaping force of urbanism—with important consequences for the methodologies of urban history. The war built vast infrastructures that became the foundation for civilian aviation, and it made the world seem a lot smaller and a lot more vulnerable. The war was also charged with strong racial discourses—the US presented itself as a bringer of global freedom while maintaining segregation at home, Germany’s aggressive quest for Lebensraum culminated in the Holocaust and the postwar struggle of dealing with this racial legacy, and the loss of Japan’s multi-ethnic empire in East Asia after WWII shaped the country’s reimagining as a monoethnic nation state. Based on evidence from urban policy, planning, architecture, and art, Schmidt investigates the urbanism of New York, Berlin, and Tokyo—the principal cities of three nations deeply implicated in the war—to challenge the notion that economic globalization alone made cities global. Instead, his work positions the postwar city as a response to war-driven global infrastructures and racial ideologies, and contributes to an understanding of the complex relationship between WWII and urbanism.