July 17, 2014 | 0 Comments

Roche Scholarship Winner Taylor Holloway

Taylor Holloway is the recipient of the 2013 AIA Chicago Martin Roche Travel Fellowship and a graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Martin Roche Fellowship offers architectural students studying in Chicago the opportunity to conduct independent research abroad on a topic of their choosing. Ms. Holloway’s project, Design Better / Design Forward, was an examination of the crucial components of public interest design practices in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Design Better/ Design Forward was conceived as an investigation of new architectural practice models and the built works of a loose confederation of architects and activists in South Africa and Zambia. The research focused on developing a metric for assessing how public interest design can, when successful, provide long term civic, infrastructural, and economic development while empowering communities to improve their physical environments in their own terms. In the course of three weeks, five cities and nearly a dozen interviews, Design Better / Design Forward uncovered the network of individuals, universities, and non-government organizations that are changing the way they design in order to change the world they live in.