Dean Mohsen Mostafavi recently announced faculty appointments and promotions—all of whom are GSD alumni. The appointments will strengthen the intellectual underpinnings of cutting-edge pedagogy and research at the GSD. In the Architecture Department, Jeannette Kuo MArch ’04 was appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture. In the Urban Planning Department, the appointments include Daniel D’Oca MUP ’02 as Associate Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Toni L. Griffin LF ’98 as Professor in Practice of Urban Planning. Additionally, Gary Hilderbrand MLA 85 has been promoted to a tenured position as Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture.

Jeanette


At the GSD, Jeannette Kuo has served as a teaching assistant and design critic for core studios in the Department of Architecture. Her faculty appointment became effective January 1, 2016. Kuo was the 2006 recipient of the competitive Maybeck Teaching Fellowship at UC Berkeley. Since then, she has also taught at MIT, and since 2011, has held a visiting professorship at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Also, she has been a guest critic at numerous institutions such as ETH Zurich, Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, Pratt Institute, Hong Kong University, and the University of Toronto.

Kuo is a founding partner of Karamuk * Kuo Architects based in Zurich. Established in 2010, the work of Karamuk * Kuo has focused on the intersection of spatial concepts with constructive technologies to approach architecture from its most fundamental sources. The office works on projects of a range of scales, from spatial installations and exhibitions to complex cultural projects, and have been published in numerous international journals including Archithese, Werk, Bau + Wohnen, and Architecture. Beyond her practice, Kuo regularly contributes to the architectural discourse through her writings and participation in conferences and symposia. Her publication, “A-Typical Plan: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office Building,” received the 2013 Most Beautiful Swiss Book Award.


DanDaniel D’Oca’s teaching at the GSD has included studios and courses in urban planning focusing on aging, suburbanization, and segregation. His new position will become effective July 1, 2016. His most recent studio invited students to consider the complex legacy of streets named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to imagine how these streets could be re-envisioned to better reflect the values of the great civil rights leader. This project was covered in the Harvard Gazette article “Returning to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy” in October 2015.

Prior to teaching at the GSD, D’Oca served as an assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he taught seminars about American urbanization and produced an award-winning public exhibition about racial segregation in Baltimore. D’Oca is also principal and co-founder of the New York City-based architecture, planning, and research firm Interboro Partners. D’Oca and his Interboro Partners Tobias Armborst MAUD ’02 and Georgeen Theodore MAUD ’02 hosted a GSD event on Monday, March 21 for recent graduates to mix, mingle, and converse. He has won many awards for Interboro’s innovative projects, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices and Young Architects Awards, and the New Practices Award from the AIA New York Chapter.

Toni L. Griffin


Toni L. Griffin returned to the GSD after spending the last five years as Professor of Architecture and Director of the J. Max Bond Center on Deign for the Just City at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. In addition to serving as Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, she also leads the Design Lab. Both positions became effective January 1, 2016. During the spring 2016 academic term, she is teaching a course titled Design for the Just City. From 2006 to 2011, she served as design critic, then adjunct associate professor, in urban design and planning at the GSD. She returned to the GSD last October as a panelist and participant in the GSD’s first-ever Black in Design conference.

Griffin also maintains an active private practice, Urban Planning and Design for the American City, which she founded in 2009. Through the practice, she served as Project Director the long-range planning initiative of the Detroit Work Project, and in 2013 completed and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework plan for urban transformation. Most recent clients include working with the cities of Memphis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. The firm recently completed the award-winning Detroit Future City Strategic Framework Plan. She began her career as an architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP in Chicago, where she became an associate partner involved in architecture and urban design projects. Watch Griffin’s inspiring TED Talk offering a new vision for Detroit.


Gary HilderbrandGary Hilderbrand’s teaching and research activities at the GSD challenge prevailing assumptions about how vegetated infrastructures are conceived, implemented, and adapted as consequential urban form. His tenured position is effective July 1, 2016. The work of his firm, Reed Hilderbrand, has been acclaimed for its understated simplicity and elegance, which belies the provision of highly technical but often invisible life support systems. The firm has been recognized by the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award and in 2013 was honored as the youngest firm ever to be designated ASLA Firm of the Year. Current commissions include a master plan for the Cranbrook Arts Community, renewal of Duke University’s West Quad and West Union, a master plan and new plaza for Yale’s Science Hill, the rebuilding of Boston’s Pier 4, the Massachusetts Fallen Heroes memorial in Boston’s Seaport Square with James Carpenter, execution of the firm’s winning competition entry for the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria, in Austin, Texas, and renewal of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Marsh Court, in Stockbridge, UK.

A committed practitioner, teacher, critic, and writer, Hilderbrand has served on the editorial boards of Spacemaker Press, Harvard Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. His personal honors include the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and the Mellon Practicing Resident Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies at Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks. As a competition juror, he has helped judge Harvard’s Green Prize for Urban Design, I Premi Europeu de Paisatge Rosa Barba Barcelona, and “Suburbia Transformed” for the James Rose Center. He chaired the ASLA National Awards Jury in 2005 and the ASLA Annual Student Awards Jury in 2006. Hilderbrand’s drawings and personal photo-collage works have been exhibited at the American Academy in Rome, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Sotheby’s New York, and the Boston University Art Gallery. He holds a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and a Master of Landscape Architecture with distinction from the Harvard GSD, where he was awarded the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, the department’s highest academic honor.

The GSD’s strength in optimizing its highly disciplinary, collaborative environment requires extraordinary instruction by superior faculty. These four appointments of esteemed leaders in their design disciplines, who are talented GSD alumni, will engage, inspire and cultivate the next generation of design leaders.