fArchitecture Alum is 2022 AIA Film Challenge Winner

Architecture alumna Claire Shue is a member of the team that won the Grand Prize in the 2022 American Institute of Architects Film Challenge. The team’s film, a dream starts here, was created to build support for a community center in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina.

The 2022 AIA Film Challenge was to “produce films about architects working with civic leaders to design sustainable and equitable communities.” A five-member jury chose a dream starts here as the competition winner from among 65 submissions.

Shue is a designer at Hanbury, a regional architecture firm with offices in Norfolk, Richmond, and Blacksburg, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Clemson, South Carolina, where Shue is based. She is one of the project leads for the Dream Center, the subject of the film, which will repurpose a dilapidated building and revitalize the center of the small, declining town of Calhoun Falls.

“We originally decided to make a video not for the AIA film Challenge, but for the client to be able to better communicate the project to the people of Calhoun Falls and hopefully to help her apply to grants for fundraising efforts,” Shue said. “For the video, I helped with coordinating with the client and helped push for public outreach within the community, also I traveled to Calhoun Falls several times with our in-house filmmakers and visualization director, to support the storytelling and messaging. I also led the interview process with the citizens of Calhoun Falls.”

After graduating from UNC Charlotte with a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, Shue went to the University of Michigan and earned a Master of Architecture in 2021. She then joined Hanbury, where she had served as a Summer Scholar in 2018.

Pictured above, a still image from “a dream starts here.”