UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nicolás Verdejo, a Penn State architecture doctoral student in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, was recognized by the Graham Foundation with a 2024 Carter Manny Writing Citation.
Established in 1996, the Carter Manny Award program supports the completion of outstanding doctoral dissertations on architecture and its role in the arts, culture and society. It is the only pre-doctoral award dedicated exclusively to architectural scholarship and recognizes emerging international scholars whose work promises to challenge and reshape contemporary discourse and impact the field at large.
A Fulbright Scholar and instructor in the Department of Architecture, Verdejo earned one of just six Carter Manny Writing Citations of Special Recognition for his thesis dissertation titled “Architectural Education Under the Iron Fist: Architecture Schools in Chile during the Pinochet Dictatorship, 1973–1990.”
“My thesis delves into the impact of an authoritarian regime on architecture education through two focuses: first, the stories of architecture schools’ communities and its individuals and secondly, curricula changes, intellectual discourses and academic productivity,” said Verdejo, a native of Chile.
Verdejo said he firmly believes that politics shape various fields and frameworks, and that architecture is no exception.
“It is crucial to understand how specific political contexts, especially under an authoritarian regime, affect the ways of producing and sharing knowledge, whether by imposing aggressive agendas of change, individual and institutional coercion, or through violence towards any opposition,” he said.
Verdejo said he hopes that the impact of his study will help make members of academic communities increasingly aware of “how we react and to what we are subject to given significant ideological and political shifts.”
“Even more importantly, this research also hopes to honor the memory of those architecture faculty and students who were victims of human rights violations at the hands of the military in Chile,” he said.
On receiving the recognition from the Graham Foundation, Verdejo said, “It is a great honor for me to represent our school among a select group of researchers from the most prestigious architecture schools in the United States. It is a powerful impulse to continue working to tell this story that occurred during one of the darkest periods in my country.”
Verdejo shares the writing citation recognition with students from the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design; MIT School of Architecture and Planning; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; and the Princeton University School of Architecture. Learn more about the 2024 honorees on the Graham Foundation website.