Each year, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation awards the Percival and Naomi Goodman Fellowship to a student graduating from Columbia University. Recipients are announced at the School’s commencement ceremony in May of each year.

The purpose of the Fellowship is to enable the recipient to carry out a project of social significance related to the interests of Percival Goodman. Projects should be strongly humanist and be committed to the possibility that lives can be changed for the better. The amount of the award is $20,000. The project may be undertaken anywhere in the world. It may last up to one year after graduation and must be concluded with a final report, as indicated below. To be eligible for consideration, applicants must currently (during the 2023-2024 academic year) be completing either an M.Arch, M.S. Advanced Architectural Design, M.S. Urban Planning, M.S. Architecture and Urban Design, M.S. Historic Preservation, or M.S. Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices degree at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation or an undergraduate degree in architecture at Columbia or Barnard College.

Percival Goodman (1904-89), a professor in Columbia’s architecture school from 1946 to 1971, was an architect, planner, artist, and writer. His built and unbuilt projects were inspired by his strong commitment to social ideals. His synagogues were among the first religious structures in the United States to be designed according to modern architectural principles. With his brother, the sociologist and writer Paul Goodman, he wrote Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (1947), which influenced a generation of architects and planners and became an important catalyst of ideas in the 1960s and early 1970s about participatory architecture, cooperative living, environmental design, and the design professional as an advocate for improved social conditions. Today his final book, The Double E (1977), linking ecology and economy, makes him a prophet of the era of sustainability that is beginning to unfold. Students applying for the grant are encouraged to examine both books. 

Note also that the Percival Goodman Architectural Records and Papers are held by the Avery Library Department of Drawings and Archives at Columbia.

This Fellowship is made possible through the generosity of Raymond Lifchez (M. Arch. ‘57), Columbia GSAPP Faculty 1961-70, in honor of his former teacher, colleague, and friend Percival Goodman.