Desiree Valadares wins J.B.C. Watkins Award: Architecture

Desiree Valadares (M.Arch. 2015), a post-professional graduate of the School, has won the J.B.C. Watkins Award: Architecture, offered by the Canada Council to a Canadian architectural student wishing to pursue postgraduate studies outside Canada. Valadares is landscape architect with degrees from the University of Guelph (MLA) and McGill University (M.Arch.). She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Architectural History program at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. In particular, she studies how historic preservation (U.S.) and heritage conservation (Canada) laws are applied to geographically disparate and remote World War II ruins and landscapes (prisoner of war camps, labour camps, internment sites) in two former U.S. territories and in the unceded lands of British Columbia. She argues that present-day legal mechanisms that enshrine sub-surface World War II military heritage and sites of significance to the Japanese diaspora fail to properly acknowledge Native Hawaiian, Alaska Native and Coast Salish connections to those lands, and their longstanding claims to sovereignty, demilitarization and decolonization.