Architectural designer Catherine Chen has been selected as the winner of the 2026 James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture.
Established in 1926, the biennial Steedman Fellowship is organized by the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at theWashU Sam Fox School, in partnership with the American Institute of Architects St. Louis. The $100,000 prize, which supports research through international travel, is awarded on the basis of applicant proposals and open to anyone who has earned an accredited degree in architecture within the last eight years. It is among the largest and oldest such fellowships in the United States.
This year’s theme, “Collective Form/Forums” honors the legacy of celebrated architect, and former WashU professor, Fumihiko Maki (1928-2024) by taking inspiration from his text, “Investigations in Collective Form.” Neeraj Bhatia, the fellowship’s jury chair and 2026-27 Rome Prize winner, shared that the theme “asks us to reconsider the nature of the collective — how it is constituted, how it is spatialized, and architecture’s role in both convening publics and giving form to shared arrangements.”
“Catherine Chen’s proposal, ’Solar Communities: Architectures of the Energy Transition,’ situates the energy transition not simply as a technical problem, but as a spatial and political project,” Bhatia said. “By examining a series of energy communities, the research operates across scales — from material assemblies and building typologies to broader settlement patterns — foregrounding questions of governance, agency and collective ownership. Ultimately, it probes how emergent energy paradigms might reconfigure forms of collectivity and participation, and how architecture can act as a mediator within these shifting frameworks.”
Read more on the Sam Fox School website.
