Of Belonging and Loss^W041

Of Belonging and Loss was the winning entry for the NZIA Warren Trust Prize for Architectural Writing in 2024. The prompt was “The building told a story” and Tessa elected to write about the violence imposed on Gaza through the current genocide and how architecture and architects are implicated. She had this to say about the piece:

“The prompt, 'the building told a story', struck me this year, and I thought a lot about what stories are told and what stories are lost when a building is destroyed. As architects we have to think about what it means for our past, future and our discipline when architecture is used as a weapon, and when buildings—and all the culture they hold, the meaning they make, the stories they tell—are victims of violence alongside the people who inhabit them, who make their lives there. The structure of this piece of writing was experimental and in it I hoped to capture some tangibility of belonging to place and of loss through written language (poetry) and architectural language (the plan).”

You can read the piece and buy the book on the NZIA website, and read the full text with references and links here.

Tessa donated the prize money to Palestinian aid causes.