Sach Grewal, a master’s student at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, has won a Maxwell Taylor Scholarship for his thesis project. 

The Maxwell Taylor Scholarship is awarded annually to students in their final year of the Master of Architecture program who have incorporated building technologies into their final thesis project.  

The prize is $1,200. A jury, comprised of faculty who were independent of the student submissions, chose the winner following a mid-term evaluation of the master’s theses. 

The scholarship was endowed in 1998 by a bequest from the estate of the late Mabel Leona Taylor. 

The Martian Vernacular: Psychological Well-Being & Closed World Architectures  

Winner: Sach Grewal 

Advisor: Assistant Professor Jerry Hacker 

This mini-thesis is confronted with questions of ethics, logistical concerns rooted in capitalism, technical advancement, 3D printing for a different world, the need to comfort human migration (the space travel kind) with somewhat dismissal and disregard for planet Earth’s survival. While it entertains the notion of colonizing Mars, it forces us to (re)consider the abandonment of everyday comforts in search of a different kind of prowess with concern for a psychological toll. 

Jury Comment: Speculative. Constrained. Threshold Imagination. Each of these terms describes the writing used to explore the boundaries of space architecture, somewhere between 21st-century primordial sensibilities and researched science fiction.