MAD-Crit student Alex Serbanescu (MArch 2025) has been awarded the 2025 Schiff Foundation Design Fellowship for Architecture for his project “Becoming-Lodge” from the Spring 2025 studio All Magnificent and Wild, taught by Associate Professor Francesco Marullo. Serbanescu is also the 2023 recipient of the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing.
The research seminar and design studio explored the hybrid typology of the residential hotel and its wide range of architectural expressions—from the ordinariness of the single-room-occupancy hotels and rooming houses to the exuberance and hybridity of home clubs and working palaces—which proliferated in Chicago’s underworld at the onset of the past century. Conflating domesticity with estrangement, individuality and commonality, permanence and flexibility, asceticism and luxury, normativity and queerness, city and architecture, the research studio proposes the residential hotel as a dwelling laboratory to challenge and expand traditional ideas about collective housing, family, ownership, and existence-minimum, conjecturing alternative forms of living together.
The Schiff Foundation Fellowships were established in 1988 to support the work of Chicago-area students of architectural design and criticism. Among the most important student prizes of their kind in the United States, the fellowships are administered annually by the Art Institute of Chicago Department of Architecture and Design.
In addition to the fellowship, Alex has also received an honorable mention for the AIA Chicago 2025 Chicago Award in Architecture Student Award for the same project.
The AIA Chicago Foundation invests in Chicago’s next generation of architectural change-makers by awarding scholarships, grants, and recognition. The Chicago Award in Architecture Student Awards recognizes exceptional student projects from local architecture schools.
Congratulations Alex!