Amanda Hallberg

I am trained as an architect. Architects are never just architects. I am a photographer. I am a furniture designer. I am an industrial designer. I am a graphic designer. I am a web designer. Like so many who seek these paths I am consumed with the need to design my entire word and to interpret everything as designed. I am overwhelmed with the enumerable sources of inspiration and my photography is the outlet for that obsession.

I was raised in a small town out west with all of the romanticisms of a slower paced life and a connection with nature. I moved away and attended Mies van der Rohe’s architecture school at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Architecture taught me to love design, materials, structures, details, and process. Chicago taught me to love the urbane. After graduating, my desire to find the perfect balance between metropolis and the natural realm eventually led me to the Pacific Northwest. I currently reside in Seattle.

Post-graduation I was awarded the prestigious SOM Prize. Through the generous fellowship awarded to one graduating student of architecture I have had the unique opportunity to pursue alternative methods of participation within the built environment. The SOM Foundation facilitated my research on the architecture of the American Modern Movement. For the past two years I have exhaustively scoured and travelled the United States seeking out as much architecture from the period that remains. To date I have been able to document not only some of the most notable works of American Modernism, but also more than 200 lesser-known buildings and residences.

As members of the profession of architecture, we become stewards of the profession. We strive to achieve new ideals and we capture the knowledge of those whose previous contributions lay the foundation for the future. I owe a debt of gratitude to the SOM Foundation for extending me this award. Their genuine effort to promote the emerging members of the profession is unmatched and embodies not only sincere philanthropy, but also the motive to put change in action, to bestow a greater conscientiousness on the emerging and to thereby improve the design fields through unconventional intellectual pursuits. This progress has influenced my entire future, with my beginnings bound up in a sense of social responsibility that I will strive to embody.