2026 Catherine W. Bishir Prize Recipient

The 2026 Catherine W. Bishir Prize recipient is Dr. Willa Granger, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Florida Atlantic University for her article"Consuming Care: The Americana Corporation and the Advent of the Modern Nursing Home,” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 84, no. 3 (September 2025): 386-411.

This article models superlative research, analysis, and argumentation, making a powerful case that architecture has been a central tool for prioritizing profit in the United States’ mixed public-private approach to eldercare, with timely implications for the social safety net more broadly. Dr. Willa Granger assembled an impressive range of primary archival material charting not only the development of a single corporate nursing home developer, the Americana Corporation, but also the transition of eldercare architecture from earlier domestic settings. She meaningfully contextualized this transition in a truly formidable range of literature both theoretical and topical including institutional and health facility design, hotel and boardinghouse histories, popular neoclassical-style roadside architecture, and the shifting federal and state regulatory and funding landscape of the mid twentieth century. Granger’s analysis features a robust consideration of scale, moving from large regional mapping, to urban and neighborhood geography, to site and architectural plan, all the way into individual nursing home rooms and furnishings. Most importantly, she used interior viewshed analysis and first-hand accounts to consider the embodied experiences of residents, nurses, and other employees, ensuring rich consideration of populations often overlooked in institutional histories. Overall, Granger’s work adds to the vitality of vernacular architecture studies with astute analysis of architectural space, design, and the human experience.

Submitted by the 2026 Bishir Prize committee: Sarah Fayen Scarlett (chair), Angelika Joseph, Gerald Pocius