Rotch Travelling Scholarship
The Rotch Travelling Scholarship provides one emerging professional with $25,000 to travel the world for a minimum of three months to study architecture.
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Founded in 1883, the Rotch Travelling Scholarship—the oldest of its kind in the United States—has been awarded to many of the country’s most distinguished architects: Henry Bacon, Ralph Walker, Wallace Harrison, Louis Skidmore, Edward D. Stone, Gordon Bunshaft, Victor Lundy and many others.
About the 2025 Rotch Travelling Scholarship
2025 Theme: "Itinerant"
What makes architecture is not brick and mortar but the momentary gathering of spatial factors and people. The 2025 Rotch Scholarship calls participants to explore the material and social protocols that give shape to culturally rich yet temporary and itinerant architectures. By focusing on built environments where the gaze of commercial interests have receded enough for something else to surface, spaces where it is the character of the occupation what makes the space, not the other way around. These are architectures with no assumptions of forevers or fixities, they appear and disappear but remain in the cultural imagination. A Guyanese soccer club, a public park known to be a common quinceañera party location, a daybreak rave spot by the out-of-business Sports Hut, an experimental chinese restaurant serving from a corner bodega in NY. Fleeting cultural/material temporary formations that take place often beyond the surface, in the shadowy, interstitial, fleeting and sometimes even neglected parts of our built environment.
Key Dates:
- Applications due:
Friday, January 31, 2025DEADLINE EXTENDED to Friday, February 28, 2025 @ 5 PM - March: Qualified applicants notified
- March/April: Start of preliminary competition
- March/April: End of preliminary competition
- April: Finalists notified
- April/May: Start of final competition
- May: End of final competition
- May: Jury for final competition and Winner Announcement
Benjamin Smith Rotch of Milton, Massachusetts studied painting in Paris in 1847 and cultivated an early appreciation for the value of foreign travel in stimulating young architects’ imagination through contact with great buildings of the past. One of his sons, Arthur Rotch, studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1874 to 1879 and further cemented this belief, as well as the Rotchs’ active patronage to fellow artists.
Upon the senior Rotch’s death in 1882, Arthur and his siblings—Abbot Lawrence, Edith, Aimee (Mrs. Winthrop Sargent) and Annie Lawrence (Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb)—established the Rotch Travelling Scholarship on October 1, 1883.
Today, the Rotch Travelling Scholarship provides one emerging professional—an architecture graduate of the past 10 years, with one year of experience in a Massachusetts firm or a degree from a Massachusetts institution—with a stiped to cover a minimum of six months of travel and architecture study abroad.
In 2002, the Rotch Trustees expanded upon the mission of architectural education through foreign travel with the establishment of the Rotch Travelling Studio grant.
The Value of Travel Scholarships
Past Rotch Exhibitions
2024—Rotch Scholar: Lindsey Krug
2023—Rotch Scholar: Stephanie Lloyd
2022—Rotch Scholar: William Smith
2021—Rotch Scholar: Kyle Barker
Meet the Rotch Travelling Scholars—Emerging Projects
Session hosted June 15, 2021
About the Rotch Travelling Scholarship with Peter Wiederspahn AIA
Endowment
When the Rotch family executed an indenture of trust on December 29, 1883 for “the advancement of education in architecture,” the stipend was set at $1,000 per year for two years of travel abroad. In 1912, the stipend amount began to increase gradually until 1936, when the Rotch Trustees and Scholarship Committee substantially increased the sum and reduced the required travel time. Today, the Rotch Scholar receives $40,000 or more for at least six months of travel.
History
In 1980, the Rotch Trustees requested that the Boston Society of Architects appoint a Rotch Scholarship Committee to advise and “develop a scheme of examinations.”
From the start, applicants were expected to be proficient in a variety of topics, including knowledge of architectural history, construction, French and drawings from the cast. In 1892, a two-stage system of design examinations was established. The preliminary jury would select several drawings that displayed evidence of “architectural potential” from which the final jury would select the Rotch Scholar. In 1959, the Rotch Scholarship Committee moved from this type of preliminary competition toward a “search for imaginative capacity” in future Rotch Scholars. Today, that search is conducted through a two-stage design competition.
Contact
If you have any questions about the competition, please contact us at [email protected].
