Booth Fellowship recipient Maya Fraser to study Danish and German housing, shared-space initiatives 

This year’s George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship has been awarded to Maya Fraser, who will investigate shared-space initiatives as a solution to the U.S. housing crisis. Fraser, M.Arch ’23 and a former Taubman Scholar, is the recipient of the 2026 Fellowship, which began in 1924 and provides recent Taubman College graduates with a $13,000 stipend toward architectural research that requires international travel.

Her project, “Common Ground: Addressing the Housing Crisis Through Shared Space,” will build on her past research into co-operative housing models to create a design toolkit for shared housing in the United States. Fraser will visit cities across Denmark and Germany — including Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, and Freiburg — to engage with residents in co-housing and Baugruppen buildings — a German practice of self-owned and communal, multi-family buildings.

“How to share space with others is personal for me,” writes Fraser in her abstract. “My whole adult life has been spent living in shared situations, including 8 years spent with roommates and 5 years in a housing co-op. When I decided to design a co-op for my M.Arch thesis project, I soon became frustrated with how few architecture-specific resources about shared space existed. My mission became clear: I realized that I wanted to create the design guide that I wished I had during my thesis.”

Fraser is a staff designer at Quinn Evans Architects and 2024 Health and Design Fellow at Michigan Medicine. As an M.Arch student, she was a Taubman Scholar and awarded a 2022 Longo Internship with MASS Design Group.

The George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship provides the opportunity for recent alumni/ae to research a special aspect of architecture that requires international travel. Each year, one recent M.Arch graduate is awarded the fellowship. Congratulations to Maya Fraser.