2024 On the Brinck Book Award + Lecture Winners
January 23, 2025
The University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning (UNM SA+P) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 On the Brinck Book Award and Lecture series, created in honor of John Brinckerhoff Jackson. The jury, comprised of Sunil Bald, Felipe Correa, Margaret Crawford, Charles L. Davis III, Catherine Page Harris, Cathy Lang Ho, and Thaïsa Way, honors the following publications:
Irene Cheng, The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, University of Minnesota Press, 2023
Avigail Sachs, The Garden in the Machine, UVA Press, 2023
Noam Shoked, In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements, University of Texas Press, 2023
UNM SA+P Dean Robert Alexander González founded the program as a Dean’s Initiative in 2020. He notes, “This award is supported by a generous endowment established by J.B. Jackson toward the end of his life. In his spirit, it affirms our commitment to promoting enlightened approaches to scholarship that emphasize new and overlooked areas of study, accessibility to the reader, and the integration of the allied disciplines we study at the School of Architecture + Planning.”
The awarded volumes embody the legacy of J.B. Jackson, a prolific writer and influential figure in the development of the field of cultural landscape studies, merging analysis of natural, built, and human landscapes. The selected works contribute new knowledge and perspectives spanning the design disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design. Together they serve as a collection that can help students, faculty, and practitioners expand design discourse and open new discussions on ways of viewing and knowing.
Coordinating juror and UNM SA+P Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Catherine Page Harris: “These three new books closely examine the details of place and the built environment to develop crucial conversations on settlement, colonialism, and form in ecological, political, and utopian contexts.”
The School of Architecture + Planning will host the authors for an afternoon symposium on March 24 to present their work and discuss the awarded volumes in the context of J.B. Jackson’s legacy and contemporary issues within architecture and design. We will update our website soon to reflect the time and more details associated with the event.
The following jury comments encapsulate the award program’s thematic connection to J.B. Jackson’s historic contributions:
In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements by Noam Shoked
Concrete and expansive, this timely book grounds critical narratives and arguments about Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory in architectural and processual detail. Based on ethnography, interviews, and archival research, the book shows how these places came to be, by revealing paradoxes rather than explicitly taking sides. Emphasizing the often contradictory role of multiple actors, architectural choices, and contingencies, the book lays bare complicity in militarized practices, social histories of radicalized Jewish traditions, and the challenges of ethical boundaries crossed in the profession of architecture. It is a significant contribution for its development of an archive of place and its engagement with the entanglements of colonialism and territorial claims. Researched and written before October 7, 2023, this book offers a grounded articulation of the palimpsests of conflict embedded in the Judean/Palestine peninsula.
The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America by Irene Cheng
Delightful, fascinating, and readable, this book explores utopia and geometry in intentional communities in 19th century America. The careful reading of architectural plans and the explanation of larger social structures through those drawings highlights representation as a communicative act, of both structure and cultures. This incisive reading expands to be a history of settler colonialism and indigenous displacement as well as a reflection on the gaps between plans and ground truths. Cheng views the built environment in a critical manner employing the critical lenses of high architecture on the middle spaces of mass-produced plans and hucksterisms. Smart and accessible writing carries the reader through a fascinating history of intentional communities and the demise of dreams.
The Garden in the Machine by Avigail Sachs
Sachs offers an overview of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the relationship between infrastructure, regional planning, and architecture in shaping a process of nation building. The Garden in the Machine provides a comprehensive narrative of the project that no other publication has achieved previously. The physical analysis of the dams and the housing types and their mobility in both space and culture, creates groundbreaking histories of this monumental control project. Sachs’ work develops detailed narratives about social impacts of the development, including racial disparities and lived experiences of the changes wrought by this infrastructure. The river, land, and power machines, as Sachs delineates, have social goals along with their mechanistic rewiring of the movement of water and production of power. Readable and groundbreaking narratives of place.