Awards

24 April 2002 |

John Heilbron
The Bancroft Library and the Friends of The Bancroft Library are awarding the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award to Professor Emeritus John Heilbron at a campus ceremony April 27. The award was established to honor “significant achievements in the support of historical research and scholarship.”

Heilbron created the History of Science and Technology Program at the Bancroft, as well as the campus’s Office for the History of Science and Technology. The two organizations have collaborated for 30 years to sponsor exhibits, colloquia and publications. His support of the Bancroft helped develop its Rare Books Collection, in which he conducted the scholarly research for much of his writing, including his 1979 book, “Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” As faculty member and administrator (Heilbron served as chair of the Academic Senate and as vice chancellor), he also championed the acquisition of historical manuscripts, books and oral histories of the American West.

Harrison Fraker
Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design, has been named a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Fellowships are awarded to “prominent designers, innovators and leaders of good design who have demonstrated the highest level of innovation, imagination and accomplishment in their chosen field, and who have used their leadership position to advance the design professions.”

Garrison Sposito
Garrison Sposito, professor of civil and environmental engineering and of environmental science, policy and management, will present the 2002 Walter J. Weber Dis-tinguished Lecture in Environ-mental Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan on April 5.

The Weber lecture is an endowed honor established in 2000 to bring to the Michigan campus “the world’s foremost experts in environmental engineering and science to share the results of their work and their vision for the future.”

Martin Wachs
Two prestigious professional associations have awarded their highest honors to Martin Wachs, professor of city and regional planning and director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. Wachs has been named to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners. He has also been appointed a lifetime national associate of the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of his extraordinary service to the group and its academies. These awards recognize Wachs’ significant contributions to planning, his excellence in professional practice, teaching and mentoring, public service, leadership and research.

Two campus scholars awarded Guggenheims
A scholar researching architecture for the homeless and another exploring same-sex sexuality in 20th-century French literature have been awarded Guggenheim fellowships.

Sam Davis, professor of architecture and associate dean of the College of Environmental Design, and Michael Lucey, associate professor of French and comparative literature, are among 184 scholars, artists and scientists nationally who will receive a total of $6.7 million in fellowships, the Guggenheim Foundation announced last week.

Guggenheim fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement and exceptional promise.

In addition to teaching, Davis is a partner in Davis and Joyce Architects in Berkeley. His work focuses on affordable housing and housing for special needs. Recent projects include a 100-bed homeless shelter in Contra Costa County, and San Fran-cisco’s Larkin Street Youth Cen-ter, the first housing in the country specifically for homeless youth with HIV and AIDS.

“Architecture is not the first thing we think about in sheltering the homeless,” Davis said. “For most homeless, the need for shelter is acute and immediate. A warm, safe place with a bed will suffice. If you are ill, if you have young children with you, the last thing you will think about is how does this place look.”

Through clients such as non-profit emergency housing and service providers, Davis said, he has come to appreciate what even a modest amount of design can do. Increasingly, design is seen as a means of establishing trust between the service provider and the homeless and is a way to create a sense of belonging for those with little or no social connection, he said.

“It is within the difficult and often tragic arena that architecture serves its highest purpose,” Davis said. “A visit to a major museum can be a powerful and moving experience. Public buildings are a reflection of our culture. But if we believe that architecture serves a society as well as reflects its values, then we must use it to provide for those with the most need and the fewest options.”
With the Guggenheim fellowship support, Davis will take a sabbatical and complete a book for lay people and professionals on designing for the homeless. Davis is also the author of the 1995 book “The Architecture of Affordable Housing.”

Michael Lucey specializes in French literature and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches social and literary theory, sexuality studies, 19th- and 20th-century British literature and culture, and 20th-century American literature and culture. He also directs the campus’s new Center for the Study of Sexual Culture.

Lucey has written a study of André Gide’s writings from the 1920s and 1930s, and just finished a book about the role of sexuality in author Honoré de Balzac’s understanding of the social world.

He will be on sabbatical for 2002-03 and with the support of the Guggenheim award will spend the first half of next year in Paris researching a new book.

“The tradition of first-person writing about same-sex sexuality in 20th-century France is a robust one, filled with distinguished and high-profile authors ranging from Colette, Proust and Gide near the beginning of the century to Angot, Dustan and Guibert near the end,” Lucey said.

“I am very eager to be working in Paris, with easy access to all the relevant documents, and also to be working with sociologists who can help me with practical and methodological information about how to think about and research social movements and their collective acts of representation,” Lucey said.