Martin Burns Named Winner of the 2024 Rieger Graham Prize

Martin will participate in a three-month Classical Design Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome

Martin Burns of Fairfax & Sammons Architects in New York has been selected as the winner of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art’s (ICAA) 2024 Rieger Graham Prize, and will participate in a three-month Classical Design Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, Burns has previously worked for Ferguson & Shamamian Architects, and has frequently served as a teaching assistant, lecturer, and instructor for ICAA Continuing Education Courses, Workshops, Intensives, and the Christopher H. Browne Drawing Tours, where his formidable compositional skills and drawing talents are clearly in evidence. Burns emphasizes the importance of hand drawing in a computer-dominated profession as still key for the architect. Additionally, he was recently elected as a member of the ICAA Fellows.

Burns plans to dedicate his time in Rome to an exploration and study of its many “places of rest,” the benches, little fountains, alcoves, niches, and more that offer respite to the pedestrian explorer of the eternal city. Perhaps less noted than many of the grand architectural edifices of Rome, these small and tranquil oases help to define and enhance the humanistic urbanism that makes Rome so welcoming to those who wander on foot. Burns will study these sites through careful hand-done measured drawing, photographic documentation, and 3D scanning, noting their composition, design detail, and relationship to the larger built environment. Burns hopes to apply lessons from these studies to help improve walkable infrastructure in the United States. He plans on publishing his drawings.

"I am honored and humbled by the jury’s decision to award me the 2024 Rieger Graham Prize," Martin Burns commented. "I plan to take full advantage of the tremendous opportunity for scholarship the American Academy offers to its lucky fellows. I look forward to wearing out my shoes and wearing down my pencils on the cobblestones of Rome."

Tags: Rieger Graham Prize, awards