The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s annual Wheelwright Prize awards $100,000 to a promising early-career architect who’s pursuing travel-based research that may leave a wide-ranging impact on the field. This year, the university selected Cooking Sections co-founder Daniel Fernández Pascual, whose proposal, “Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation,” will focus on the intertidal zone: coastal territory exposed to air at low tide, and covered with seawater at high tide.

In his research, Fernández Pascual has found that two unexpected forms of aquatic life—seaweed and shellfish—have been crucial sources of nutrients and building materials for thousands of years. Both forms of aquatic life can provide a basis to create new types of concrete and thermal insulation, and can offer clues into rethinking the construction sector and its environmental impact.“There’s an urgency to find materials that respond to dynamic ecosystems, to support eco-social innovation and architectural ingenuity along coastal zones, and to understand forms of cohabitation to support thriving ecosystems and societies,” he says.

The Wheelwright Prize jury, which includes 2016 winner Anna Puigjaner and Sarah Whiting, Harvard GSD’s chair of the Department of Architecture, selected Fernández Pascual in part because he plans to adapt his research around current travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus. He envisions a two-phase strategy in which he starts research remotely and conducts site visits during a later phase when travel restrictions are lifted. “The potential for an investigation to play out so globally is rare,” says Whiting, “but the relevance of this topic and the care with which Daniel has organized his research agenda make me confident that this work will have a profound and widespread impact.” Fernández Pascual aims to eventually create an educational facility on coastal ecologies based on his research.

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