The June issue of the Avery Review has published the winners of our sixth annual Avery Review Essay Prize, which celebrates students’ critical writing on architecture and the built environment. The Avery Review says, "We are immensely humbled by the breadth, thoughtfulness, and inventiveness of the submissions we received this year, and we’re incredibly grateful to all the writers for entering the competition with such openness and care."

The winning essays are remarkable for their vantage points onto communities, sites, and materials that are often overlooked, whether incidentally or by design. This year’s authors have gifted us with obscure or obscured objects of review. They center not only people and places, but also ways of rethinking and rereading the histories, tools, and figures that have delineated these disciplines. They provoke us to relearn familiar spaces and question our values in design. In this way, we are honored to share their work.

Second prize is awarded to Yakin Ajay Kinger (CEPT University); Mariam Aref Mahmoud (Columbia University); and Sonia Sobrino Ralston (Harvard University). In “Undoing Empire: Rereading the Destruction of India’s Baghs,” Kinger writes a decolonial historiography of Indian baghs from pre-revolution to present day, studying archives, image circulation, and physical sites to counter-read the legacy of a colonial military geography. 

Read Yakin Ajay Kinger's essay here.

Yakin Kinger joined SAH in 2022 and is a 2023 recipient of the SAH IDEAS Research Fellowship. He was also awarded an SAH Annual Conference Independent Scholar Fellowship in 2023.