Taubman College Students Honored in 2026 Saarinen Swanson Essay Contest
Ten Taubman College students have been recognized in the annual Saarinen Swanson Essay Contest. Their essays explored the role of architecture in an uncertain world through global case studies in Bangladesh, China, and Jordan.
This year, there were two winners, three runners-up, and five honorable mentions. Hanae Somoa, Ph.D. U.R.P., and Annie Zhang, B.S. Arch ‘27, were awarded $3,000 each in prizes. Rand Makarem, Ph.D. U.R.P., Maddie Tay, B.S. Arch ’26, and Eda Bozkurt, Ph.D. Arch, were awarded $2,000 each as runners-up.
Honorable mentions received $1,000 each: Tazkira Amin, M.U.R.P. ’27; Mishbah Shahid, B.S. Arch ’26; Maryam Bade, B.S. Arch ’25; Sumayah El-Ganainy, B.S. Arch ‘27; Elyse Cote, M.U.R.P./M.U.D. ’25.
Established in 1994, the contest encourages the use of writing to generate and disseminate ideas about architecture and planning. It is open to all students at Taubman College, at any level, in any program. The competition seeks 1,000- to 1,500-word essays addressing contemporary issues in architecture, planning, and related topics. The essay can be a new text or work produced for a course. Submissions were judged by architecture and urban planning professors Kimberly Kinder, Sharon Haar, Scott Campbell, and Gabriel Cuellar.
Here are the titles and an excerpt from each of their essays:
Somoa for “Not Always ‘Self-Built’ or ‘Self-Made’: The Conditionality of Housing Material Choices in Dhaka’s Informal Settlement”
Excerpt: “It is a hot and humid afternoon in June. The monsoon season has just begun in Bangladesh, bringing heavy rainfalls and flooding, while the hot sun after the rain clears turns the environment to brutal humidity. Informal settlements, often located in low-lying areas and particularly vulnerable to natural disasters due to their location, as well as their densely settled structures and less durable materials, face additional challenges during this season. As we discuss concerns about housing construction and modification in the heated room of a structure built from corrugated tin sheets, the standing fan circulating warm air and wrapping our bodies in heavy, humid air, a tenant wishes they had more freedom to alter their living space.”
Zhang for “Whose City: Beijing’s Public Space Transformation in an Age of Uncertainty”
Excerpt: “The renovation around 2020 transformed the Dirty Street into a “clean street”: uniform facades, planned storefronts, tidy streetscape—all conforming to the aesthetic order of a modern metropolis. A bar owner who once lived through the Dirty Street’s golden era returned to open a new spot on the same block, but the past could not be recreated. The informal vendors who once provided affordable food and goods are gone. The young people who once gathered spontaneously now find no belonging among Instagram-style storefronts. People now come here for shopping, taking photos, and following trends—a destination for influencers, a backdrop for the camera, a place to see and be seen in the digital age—a place designed for consumption rather than congregation.”
Makarem for “RE BUILD Learning to Build When the Ground Keeps Shifting”
Excerpt: “The RE:BUILD project offers a direct response to the challenges of building under extreme conditions of uncertainty. Through its re-deployable and ecologically responsive structures, the project demonstrates how architecture can emerge from scarcity rather than be constrained by it. Constructed using raw, readily available materials found in and around the camp such as sand and gravel alongside standard construction components like scaffolding and steel framework tubes, the system challenges the notion that meaningful architecture requires permanence or complex technologies (Franco, 2015).”
Tay for “Designing for Protest and Public Discourse”
Excerpt: “An example of how architecture has served protest can be found locally in the heart of Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. In the middle of central campus, the University’s most iconic campus buildings surround a public square known as the diag. When the weather is fair, there’s a buzz of activity—students gather, study, picnic, set up hammocks, and play spike ball. Every now and then, it also becomes active ground for protest, serving as a key site over Michigan’s long history. Some instances in the past couple years include: the continued assembly of the Graduate Employee’s Organization to negotiate for increased salary and benefits in 2023, and the month-long encampment to protest the University’s investment in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in the spring of 2024. In these cases, and many more, the diag functioned as a crucial foundation for these protests, providing a central and impactful location to gather and an environment designed to the scale of the human.”
Bozkurt for “Designed to Wait”
Excerpt: “I had been trained to read spaces like this differently; to look for intention, function, completion. To understand uncertainty as something design responds to; something to be managed through flexibility, contingency, or adaptation. Within that training, gaps like these appeared as temporary vacancies, phased delays, and technical inefficiencies within an otherwise coherent plan. But this framing is itself a form of displacement. It displaces lived experience from what can be recognized, measured, or planned. It assumes that the map is the truth, and that lived experience is the error.”
Amin for “Learning from the Arsenal of Democracy”
Excerpt: “In reviewing the history of cities like Detroit, it is important to focus on concepts like grit and joy in order to move beyond the deficit frame often utilized by individuals with power (like planners and architects) who enter communities as saviors. In reframing, practitioners can reimagine a future alongside residents where Detroit can thrive through investment in communities that have been crucial in uplifting the city from the beginning. Further, those in the field would greatly benefit from looking to Black legacy residents and legendaries. Not only do they have ‘sacred place-based wisdom,’ as the author of Black Public Joy Jay Pitter says, but also because they have and continue to survive during times of uncertainty oppression (Pitter, 2026).”
Shahid for “Between Two Grounds: Belonging, Migration, and Designing Through Uncertainty”
Excerpt: “Travel also revealed something deeper about cities themselves. They are never static. People constantly move between places, bringing different languages, traditions, and ways of living, and cities absorb these movements and transform over time. In this sense, uncertainty is not an interruption, it is a permanent condition of urban life. The streets and public spaces I encountered in the Netherlands and Belgium reflected this reality. Flexible public environments such as canalsides, plazas, and shared streets allowed people from different backgrounds to occupy the same spaces comfortably. These places did not demand a single identity. Instead, they created room for many identities to exist together.”
Bade for “To Design for The Uncertain Body”
Excerpt: “If uncertainty, like pain, unravels one’s experience of the world (unmaking), then designing within such conditions (making) cannot begin from assumptions of stability or resolution. Instead, architecture must be understood as a form of making that responds directly to this unmaking—not by restoring a fixed order, but by offering conditions through which the body can reorient itself. Design, in this sense, is not the imposition of certainty, but the conscientious construction of frameworks that allow for the gradual rebuilding of meaning, continuity, and a belonging of the body.”
El-Ganainy for “A Thought In Progress”
Excerpt: “That being said, design is never so simple. One might claim to hold a neutral design philosophy, but design is never autonomous. Every project relates to its context. Every design should dance and weave itself around the lives of its users. But what do we do when these things become uncertain? When we do not know what’s to come or how people, land, war, and climate will change? In times of unpredictability, I believe it is the duty of a designer to confront these questions directly: How will my design engage with war? How will it coexist with the climate? These are the questions we should be asking, especially in times of local and global unease.”
Cote for “In Plain Sight: Authoritarian Inheritance”
Excerpt: “Built in the 1930s as a local headquarters for the Fascist regime, the Ex Casa del Fascio in Settecamini embodies complexities of Italy’s 20th-century history. It stands as a relic of totalitarianism, propaganda, and the pursuit of imperial revival – revealing how Mussolini weaponized architecture, urbanism, and art to project legitimacy, modernity, and authority. Settecamini, a once rural-village along the Tiburtina road, became a self-built working-class settlement near industrial zones. The Casa del Fascio here shows how the regime’s architecture extended beyond Rome’s monumental core, swiftly spreading political influence across the national landscape. The regime’s architectural strategy had advanced beyond symbology and form into infrastructural networks for ideological dissemination.”
