Kristina Borrman has received an award from the Society of Architectural Historians for her research and essay on historic interiors.
The inaugural Historic Interiors Article Award recognizes excellence in scholarly work that has made a significant contribution to the study of historic interiors.
Borrman, assistant professor in the School of Design and Construction, received the award for her essay, “Choose Coziness, Clutter, and Color: June Jordan’s Instructions for Children in Public Housing” that was published in Winterthur Portfolio.
The essay is about June Jordan and the 1970s-era children’s book she wrote about “beautifying” public housing. The children’s book “countered modernist narratives about public housing by disassembling the links that connect cleanliness, sparseness, and whiteness with respectable families,” says Borrman.
Borrman is a cultural historian working at the intersection of built-environment history, art history, and the history of material culture. With WSU since 2022, her area of research is in the construction of social identity, including race, gender, and class, in the built environment. She has studied historical efforts by American architects to promote social justice through design. In 2023, she received a year-long fellowship from the Huntington Library to conduct research on Paul Revere Williams, a Black architect who worked to support Black-owned banks in Los Angeles during the mid-20th century.
