Graham Foundation Fellowship Awarded to Architecture Professor-Led Project Team

Fieldwork Collaborative Projects was awarded a 2018 Graham Foundation Fellowship for its Park District documentary project. Fieldwork Collaborative is a transdisciplinary organization led by Illinois Tech's College of Architecture Studio Associate Professor Andrew Schachman as well as Nelly Agassi, Ionit Behar, and Merav Orgav.

Park District is an interactive, web-based documentary and archive exposing the Chicago park network as a multiple and distributed platform for cultural life and civic activation. With more than 600 parks and 438 fieldhouse structures, the Chicago Park District is a unique network of public spaces. Fieldwork is interested in both local and global questions of “publicness”—the complex patterns of individuals and communities, and the systems that organize them. Part of a network of sites, each park is a polyvalent territory, at once natural, social, psychological, ecological, political, ethnic, historic, and economic.

Through offsite interviews and onsite videography, the documentary portrays the Chicago Park District as a platform of infinite potential. While this documentary supports and inspires cultural activation and art production, it also supports civic authorities, community organizers, and educators, among others, as a resource and basis to promote the Park District’s facilities and activities.

Fieldwork Collaborative Projects connects communities, park districts, civic authorities, and public schools with artists, curators, designers, urbanists, and other professionals from a wide range of disciplines. It is dedicated to increasing cultural capital in the Chicago region, seeking potentials already latent within the region’s existing public spaces, networks, and infrastructures.