Graduate Fellows in Sustainable Architecture and Design, 2008

The eight Graduate Fellows 2008-2010 are architects, planners, and urban designers hailing from the United States, Brazil, Egypt, Greece/Canada, and Colombia. They began their experience at the July 2008 Building Craft Apprentices Summer School and are now on their placements at private architectural firms.

Graduate Fellows Newsletter:
The Graduate Fellows at the 2008 Summer School

The 2008 Prince of Wales Building Craft Apprentices Summer School was the first to be joined by The Foundation’s brand-new Prince of Wales Graduate Fellows in Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism. Eight Fellows joined the 12 apprentices and the five external delegates (who came specially from Turkey, Nigeria, and the US for this event) for the three-week school, which comprised introductory days in London including two days of drawing masterclasses; ten days in Lincoln, working primarily in the cathedral workshops, and enjoying lectures from cathedral staff and other related professionals; and a one-week, live design project at Poundbury

The eight Graduate Fellows mixed very well with the craft apprentices, working alongside them both in the cathedral workshops and in the Poundbury studios. This was especially gratifying given that, while the apprentices were recruited from building skills courses at FE colleges across England, the Fellows hail from all over the world, and come from a wide variety of professional backgrounds. Dani Amarant, from the University of Richmond, Virginia, has a background in Rhetoric and Communication as well as in Urban Studies; Katie Goodrum recently graduated from University of Pennsylvania with a Master’s degree in City and Regional Planning; Khaled El-Neshily has extensive experience as an architectural engineer in Egypt, and recently completed his Master’s degree in Urban Planning in Oxford Brookes University; the Trinidadian Wilhelm Nothnagel studied architecture at the University of Miami; Laura Pinzon is a Columbian architect; Bethany Ritter is a practicing architect from Connecticut; Bethania Soriano is a practising urban designer (with Italian citizenship) from Brazil; while Greek-born Aristofanis Soulikias, who completed his architecture degrees at McGill University in Montreal, has worked in Greece and most recently finished a Master’s in Conservation at the University of York.

This encouragingly multinational band of Fellows has melded together very well, and is now attached to operating departments of The Foundation for 11 months with the exception of Ari who is on placement with John Simpson Architects. During their Foundation attachments, they will spend much of their time with one of the Projects teams, and will participate in at least three Enquiries by Design and two major public events.

From July 2009 the Fellows were seconded for one year to a private design practice that is a member of The Foundation’s network. During that summer, they spent a week at the residential summer school in Aberdeen, sharing their expertise through teaching planning professionals, craft students and architects how to apply traditional building techniques to architectural processes and urban interventions.