Images by Lindsey Krug
2024 Rotch Scholar
Lindsey Krug, 2024 Rotch Scholar
Lindsey Krug has been named the 2024 Rotch Travelling Scholarship recipient.
The 2024 Rotch Travelling Scholarship Competition, embracing a theme of Pardon Our Appearance, challenged applicants to explore how maintenance and care shape the built environment.
Maintenance work is all around us, yet it is almost always hidden from public view. It takes place during the peripheral hours of the day and at the margins of our spatial imaginaries, in stark contrast to established narratives of progress and innovation that lie at the very core of the architectural profession. The 2024 Rotch Traveling Scholarship invited participants to explore the underlying regimes of maintenance and care that shape the built environment, from domestic rituals of cleaning and repair to the stewardship of existing building stock and material resources to the collective upkeep of our public spaces and infrastructural systems. By re-positioning the architect as a caretaker of the people, places, and resources around them, the competition invited proposals that shift our understanding of maintenance from a remedial act to a critical framework for exploring alternative value systems, spatial practices, and material ethics.
Lindsey Krug is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with an MArch in 2019, Lindsey moved to Chicago to work for Studio Gang Architects. Later she transitioned to teaching full time as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to pursue her primary interests, which lie in analyzing the social and cultural impacts of architecture on the bodies that occupy built space. Through the lens of the architectural user as a body in space, Lindsey's work focuses on how design solidifies and reinforces bodily taboos, hierarchies, and inequities into built form and seeks alternative futures for architectural inhabitants. She has contributed to spatial research investigating human rights abuses against protesters in the 2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, ongoing and projected climate risks of melting permafrost in Russia, and relationships between gender, typology, and the architectural generic. Most recently, her research has focused on 1) the legacy of a constitutional right to privacy, its impacts on architectural space and 2) the architectural and environmental eco-system enabling and resulting from the expansion of the dollar store industry in America and abroad.