Architecture professor wins prestigious Rotch Travelling Scholarship

Assistant Professor of Architecture David Costanza has won the 2020 Rotch Travelling Scholarship, a historic, prestigious award that supports international travel and research.

Costanza, who is director and lead designer at DCS (David Costanza Studio), will receive a $40,000 stipend to travel the world to study architecture, currently planned in the summer and fall of 2021.

Founded in 1883 in honor of Benjamin Smith Rotch, the Rotch Travelling Scholarship is an annual two-stage design competition held in Boston. The first stage is a weekend-long design competition from which six finalists are chosen. The finalists vie in a 10-day competition that culminates in a design presentation to a distinguished jury in Boston. Jurors evaluate projects for “evidence of imaginative capacity.”

The first phase of the 2020 competition, “Radical Accessories,” challenged designers to “a radical reconceptualization of an existing typology — the accessory dwelling — as an avenue for growth in Boston’s 21st century.” The second phase, “On Display,” asked finalists to design a museum “of and for architecture” in Boston’s Copley Square, in which “the artifact on display … is the architecture itself.”

View Costanza’s winning design here.

Costanza is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he completed a Master of Architecture with a concentration in Computation and a Master of Science in Architecture Building Technology. His research addresses the emerging digital and technical advancements reshaping the discipline. The work aims to establish a dialogue between representation, computational design tools, digital manufacturing and the innovative use of building materials.