The John Belle Travel Fellowship
The John Belle Travel Fellowship is a $10,000 annual award by the Beyer Blinder Belle Foundation in honor of John Belle, FAIA, RIBA, Hon. PhD, a founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners. John devoted his career to the public realm — the planning, design, restoration and adaptive reuse of public buildings and urban centers. The purpose of the Fellowship is to expand students’ understanding of the public realm in existing cities through travel and research, and how the knowledge gained might be applied to contemporary urban needs and design challenges.
2023 John Belle Travel Fellow
NICOLE NIAVA | Yale School of Architecture (M.Arch I)
Catalysing Climate-Resilient Dwelling:
An investigation of The Great Green Wall (GGW).
As temperatures are rising around the globe, many areas of the world are exposed to the direct effect of climate change. In extremely dry conditions adjacent to the Sahel region, communities are forced to migrate as their only mean of survival against the crisis.
The Great Green Wall (GGW) is an ecological restoration project against land degradation, desertification, and drought.
You can view Nicole’s complete proposal here.
List of Past John Belle Travel Fellows
2021
WILLIAM HANSEN | University of British Columbia | Hip Hop Architecture
“Not only did the Fellowship deepen my understanding of the public realm, it helped me engage with communities other than mine. Therefore, the trip helped me develop techniques on how to better serve and listen to the people that are directly affected by the design choices of the architectural practice.”
2020
SAMANTHA RADICE | University of California | The Child, The City, The Street
“The Fellowship offered a chance to pursue a latent intuition about the built environment, explore its prevalence and thus significance in context, and to broaden my understanding of architecture beyond the studio environment.”
2019
JAMES PIACENTINI | Columbia University | Riace Rinasce [Riance Reborn]
“The opportunity to travel, to study architectural history as an act of social justice and cultural engagement made this Fellowship uniquely significant in my eyes.”
2018
MIGUEL SANCHEZ-ENKERLIN | Yale University School of Architecture | Becoming Magical
“John Belle was clearly someone who left a positive mark on the people, places, and work in his life. In a sense, that legacy served as a point of inspiration for my project proposal but also presented a model of a person who many designers aspire to be like.”
2022
CLARE FENTRESS | Yale University School of Architecture | A Forever Home in the City
“The John Belle Travel Fellowship is remarkable in its commitment to both civic space & educating young designers; by yoking the two, it affirms a belief in the social & political consequences of architecture. I'm deeply grateful to be supported in my research by such a legacy.”
