Architecture student CoCo Tin ’19 is one of three recipients of this year’s Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship. The firm presents the award, totaling $10,000, to students who are in their penultimate year at one of its 27 partner design schools nationwide.

The goal of the award is to allow students to broaden their education through a summer of travel before their final year of school.

“This year’s award will benefit CoCo Tin, a student whose talent and dedication to the study of architecture set her apart,” says Andrea Simitch, department chair and professor of architecture. “CoCo is … deeply committed to learning and pursues every opportunity available to her. [Assistant Professor] Leslie Lok and I were excited to support the remarkable portfolio that she developed around her proposal to investigate the critical topic of health and ideas about curative spaces.”

The fellowship will support Tin’s eight-week trip to sites that will inform her project, “Architectures of Alternative Care: Repurposing Sanatoriums Across Cultures and Climates.” Her study is specific to 20th century sanatorium buildings in Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Japan.

Following site visits in these locations, Tin will study for three weeks at the Wellcome Library in London, with a focus on health and medical histories.

“Changes in human activities that overlap with contexts of nature, technology, economics and politics promote the re-emergence of infectious disease, a condition that highlights the need for public spaces of health to be reinserted back into society,” Tin wrote in her proposal. “We live in an age of antibiotics, improved sanitation, information, hyperconnectivity and the globalization of cities. Yet historic welfare-state policies promoting good health as a social right of every citizen have been increasingly transferred to individual responsibility – and the sanatorium, one of the most celebrated building types of the last century, has seemingly disappeared from public memory and left to decay. This fellowship will allow for an investigation of functioning sanatoriums as a model in Western medicine and how it has been adapted by other cultures for the development of alternative spaces of care.”

The KPF award includes $8,000 to support summer travel, and an additional $2,000 to support a final report – in Tin’s case, an exhibition including drawings that situate the sanatorium buildings in their social, political and cultural contexts; photography; and written narrative.

In addition to Tin, Isabel Branas Jarque (M.Arch. ’20) is the first AAP master’s student to receive an honorable mention.

Edith Fikes is a design and communications assistant at the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.