School Notes: School of Architecture
May/June 2016

Student heads to England on Gates fellowship

Sofia Singler ’16MArch has been awarded a highly competitive international Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a PhD in architecture at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her undergraduate degree. Singler is in her second year as an Edward P. Bass Scholar in Architecture at the school. Growing up in Finland, where she began to study architecture at the age of 10, Singler was inspired by the buildings of the country’s most prominent modernist architect, Alvar Aalto. Her dissertation will examine Aalto’s religious design and its relation to modernism. She also plans to teach architecture to children. “An understanding of the built environment in its full cultural context is a civic responsibility and privilege that, at best, cultivates a critical approach to architecture in the next generation’s thinkers—it is this gift that I aim to give back to others,” she said. The Gates Cambridge Trust was established in 2000 through a gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the university.

Travel fellow to study “negative space” in Japan

Shayari De Silva ’11, ’16MArch, has won a KPF/Paul Katz Travel Fellowship, which is given each year to assist international students in their study of issues of global urbanism upon graduation from a master of architecture program. De Silva will use the award to study the Japanese concept of “ma” (the gap between two structural parts) as it applies to public and private spaces in Tokyo.