Through the school of architecture at the University of Illinois, I have been awarded the Ryerson Traveling Fellowship. With the traveling fellowship, I will have the chance to spend eleven weeks studying and working with Allan Schwarz and the Mezimbite Sustainable Forestry Programme in Mozambique, Africa. Allan Schwarz is a practicing architect and former architecture professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Allan continues to practice architecture internationally and is currently working on a project for an ecological educational center in Gorongosa National Park. I will also be able to participate in Allan’s Mezimbite Sustainable Forestry Programme. Allan founded the Mezimbite Sustainable Forestry Programme in 1993. This operation works with communities in and near the forest to create products from a sustainable harvest of the trees and other forest plants to both generate income and maintain the forest. The chance to work with Allan Schwarz – an international architect and practitioner of sustainable design techniques – and his Mezimbite Sustainable Forestry Programme will provide me with the opportunity to better my understanding of the cultural and ethical responsibilities of architecture.

I will also be exposed to an array of architecture, in particular vernacular Mozambican structures, materials, and building techniques. I will experience architecture remaining from a history of colonialism, primarily Portuguese and Arabic structures. This opportunity offers me the incomparable chance to study through daily contact with and observation of life, culture and architecture in Mozambique and nearby regions. This experience provides the chance to develop a better understanding of the relationship between life and the built environment. In particular, I will be studying and practicing conservation and sustainability in architecture and in nature.

You may recognize some of the photographs from my travels in Europe. I will post photographs from Mozambique shortly.