PAYETTE is pleased to announce Michelle Ovanessians is the recipient of a Merit Award for Excellence in Architecture Student Design from the AIA Fort Worth for her thesis “Armenian Genocide, Rituals and How We Memorialize: Criticism of Monuments and Memorials Towards a New Methodology.”
Michelle is a recent graduate of the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design and recipient of the 2023 PAYETTE Sho-Ping Chin Memorial Academic Scholarship. Michelle is an Armenian American Architectural Designer who yields a careful response of expression in her projects, emphasizing beliefs and specificities of the population that might not have been considered before. Cultivated through her upbringing in Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United States, this exposure to vast lifestyles drives her sense of design where she strives meticulously to integrate site-specific stories, both essential and transformative, to provide awareness of social and cultural perspectives.
Michelle’s project stood out amongst the entries and was a clear favorite of the jury…
Jury comment
The 2025 OpenLAB Boston studio work will be exhibited at Virginia Tech Monday, March 2nd through Wednesday, March 4th.
Please join us for the following events on Monday, March 2nd:
11:00am - Lecture with Parke MacDowell
1:00pm Lobby talk with Kevin Sullivan
This year’s studio identifies seven sites along the frayed edges of Boston’s Greenway. The Greenway is a one-mile-long linear park running through the heart of the city, reconnecting downtown Boston with its waterfront. Many of the parcels along its edges remain undeveloped and present mute, blank facades to the public realm. Addressing and repairing these edges through acts of infilling, layering, grafting, framing, and placemaking is the core focus of the studio—SUTURE.