2026 IPA Independent Project Residency at the Block House

The Institute for Public Architecture (IPA) welcomes applications for the 2026 Independent Project Residency based at the historic Block House on Governors Island.

The IPA Independent Project Residency program invites emerging and mid-career practitioners – whose work focuses on the public realm – to live and work during an eleven week live-in Residency at the IPA Block House on Governors Island. The Residency seeks to create new interdisciplinary opportunities for collective thinking by providing communal space for architects, urbanists, landscape architects, designers, artists, and researchers to live, work, and develop independent projects within the community of the residency.

Applicants will bring their own interests to the program and will have opportunities to engage with the public, interact with the context of Governors Island, and develop an activation to be displayed during a final culminating public event at the Block House.

IPA Fellows are among the first civilian residents to live on the Island since the Coast Guard’s exit in 1996. Fellows will enjoy unparalleled historic, natural, and urban resources with direct access to downtown Manhattan and waterfront Brooklyn neighborhoods via ferry. The IPA, a long-term tenant on Governors Island together with Billion Oyster Project, the Harbor School, Earth Matter, Beam Center and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, is one of more than twenty arts, cultural, educational, and environmental nonprofit organizations operating on the Island, forming a unique community that connects with a diverse and growing audience of nearly one million annual visitors. Source: https://instituteforpublicarchitecture.org/Open-Call