Architecture Alumnus Receives Cavin Fellowship to Research in Japan and Scandinavia

Michael D’Ambrosia, a 2003 University of Oregon architecture graduate, was awarded the 3rd annual Cavin Family Traveling Fellowship. D’Ambrosia travels this summer to Japan and Scandinavia to study the architectural execution of each culture from building structure and detailing to material expression. Practicing as an architect in San Diego, he was chosen from over 30 participants from around the country.

For the first four of ten weeks, D’Ambrosia will travel to the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara. For the next eight weeks, he will travel throughout northern Europe from the city of Tallinn in Estonia, through Finland, Sweden and Norway and ending in Denmark. He hopes to learn from the precise nature of Japanese and Scandinavian architecture and the use of materials and methods in creating functional and aesthetic architecture. D’Ambrosia said, “the controlled craftsmanship evident in both Japanese and Scandinavian design quietly recedes and manifests a singular composition of functional beauty.”

Each year the Cavin Fellowship awards $10,000 to a promising recent graduate, under 35 years of age, from the University of Oregon or California Polytechnic State University Pomona. In its inaugural year, the award went to Mark Chenchin, a graduate of the University of Oregon and the following year it went to Cal Poly Pomona graduate, Robert Alexander. The award is intended to advance the recipient’s education through a 10-week self-devised foreign travel-study.

The award is granted to the winner of a juried design competition. This year’s competition involved the design of a re-entry center for foster children on an urban block in Corvallis, Oregon. Four finalists were chosen to further discuss their design concepts with the jury. In addition to D’Ambrosia, the finalists included Jeffrey Guggenheim of Portland, Oregon, Keith Simon of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Daniel Strenning of Santa Rosa, California. The jury commended D’Ambrosia’s project as “a solution with an elegant screen-treatment surrounding the building, yet with user control. The scheme held a sensitive understanding of strategies that would work in the Oregon climate, supported by technical information. And there was a clear conceptual connection between the program and provisions for transitioning foster children to adulthood.”

For more information on the Calvin Fellowship, visit http://www.cavinfellowship.com/