Michael Lehrer MArch ’78 and his firm, Lehrer Architects, will collaborate with the City of Los Angeles on their award-winning transitional housing design for a project to combat homelessness in Los Angeles. The Tiny Homes Transitional Housing Project at the Whitsett West site will be the firms fourth collaboration with the city.
Sofia Koutsenko MArch ’15 and her practice DROM were selected by Wallpaper* as one of 20 Architects’ Directory 2021 practices from across the globe. Together with two other partners, Timur Karimullin and Timur Shabaev, they launched their practice in 2017 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Since this time, they have been fortunate to build a number of projects. Among them is an award-winning public space, Azatlyk Square in Naberezhnye Chelny, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. Current projects under construction include an expansion of a factory campus in Zulte, Belgium, a new park in Derbent, Russia, and affordable housing in cities across Russia.
Find DROM on Instagram @drom_rotterdam
Cultured Magazine named Kate Orff MLA ’97 and Martha Schwartz GSD ’77 to their list of Landscape Living Legends.
According to Cultured: “In recent decades, landscape architects and designers have played an increasingly significant role in shaping our communities and developing urban spaces that are more hospitable to pedestrians, bicyclists, pet owners and people who want to gather or just need some fresh air. But these professionals generally remain less lauded than the high-profile architects who design our buildings. While perhaps they’ve yet to achieve starchitect status, we believe these five designers—all of whom think deeply about our relationship with the natural world—deserve a prominent place in any good design pantheon.”
Read the full article.
Image below: In Chongqing, China, the 2019 hot pot master garden at the upper Yangtze River City flower art expo was designed by Martha Schwartz Partners.
David De Celis MArch ’98 and his firm, DCVL Design, have been honored by the US Department of Energy (DOE) with a 2021 Housing Innovation Award for their Zero-Energy Home, in collaboration with Energy Vision Homes, Hollis, NH.
According to the website: “Since 2013, the DOE Housing Innovation Awards have honored the very best in innovation on the path to zero energy ready homes by recognizing forward-thinking builders delivering American homebuyers with a better homeowner experience.
Wendy W Fok DDes ’17 is one of 500 New York City-based artists to receive $5,000 through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment as well as Queens Theatre. Fok was recognized for “Things Left Unsaid” and their research on “digitalSTRUCTURES”, which will bring the exhibition and talk-series to a physical exhibition at NEW Inc. incubator venue organized by the New Museum in New York, and at the Italian Pavilion in the Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. The two-city exhibition, along with the digital exhibition is to allow a larger network of creatives who could be reviewing the materials locally and internationally. Events will be from August 27, 2021, to November 21, 2021.
The two-part project will include the exhibition of the “Things Left Unsaid” talk-series, and digital objects of everyday objects that will be partnered with a marketplace digital auction, research published in a post-exhibition book within the larger research umbrella of digitalSTRUCTURES. All the pre-recorded (audio/visual) videos are processed and edited to 30-minute formats. They are available to the public on social media (see below) and virtually at the CityX Venice website and digitalSTRUCTURES.cc.
Instagram: @WendyWFok
Twitter: @W_W_F
Message for Dr. Shoichi Kajima’s Memorial delivered by Professor Peter G. Rowe on July 14, 2021.
“Well after his passing in 2020, Dr. Shoichi Kajima is and will be gratefully and respectfully remembered by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. where he received his Master of Architecture degree in 1957 prior to his PhD in architecture at Tokyo University and his assumption of the directorship of the Kajima Corporation. The great, great grandson of the corporation’s founder, Dr. Kajima oversaw the company’s flourishing as one of the oldest and largest construction companies in Japan, providing services in design, engineering, construction, and real estate. Indeed, during an untimely downturn in the 1990s, he expanded operations into the fledgling yet important environmental sector. Throughout this activity he was particularly involved in the design and construction of the headquarter office buildings, consistently creating spaces that were rational, functional, and restrained without special attachment to style. In addition to receipt of his professional architecture degree from Harvard, Dr. Kajima established the Kajima Chair in Architectural Design in 1989, the fourteenth endowed professorship at the school and occupied since its inception by B. Mack Scogin, the former Chairman of the Department of Architecture. Kajima also served as a member of the Visiting Committee to the Graduate School of Design between 1986 and 1992, contributing to the School’s excellence. Today he is well remembered as a dignified and constant inspiration for generations of architects to come.”
Peter G. Rowe
Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor
Former Dean of the Faculty of Design, 1992-2004
The Climate Boot Camp is a training initiative created by the Harvard Alumni for Climate and the Environment (HACE) shared interest group and Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s The Climate Reality Project. HACE, an official Harvard Alumni Association shared interest group, developed the Climate Boot Camp, which launches in October. The program is designed for leaders who are deeply concerned about the climate crisis and want to know more about proven strategies, approaches, and tools that support win-win action plans and help drive organizational change.
The Climate Boot Camp is a five-session online program that starts October 14th – see registration for the full schedule. Register Now.
The GSD remembers Cornelia Hahn Oberlander BLA ’47 who passed away at age 99 on May 22, 2021. Oberlander was a pioneer in the field of sustainable design, an early proponent of green roofs, and a champion of collaboration. She once said that her dream is “green cities with green buildings where rural and urban activities live in harmony.”
A member of the class of 1947, Oberlander was one of the first women admitted to the GSD. She described herself as “elated” upon receiving her acceptance letter from Dean Joseph Hudnut and recalls sharing desk space with Lawrence Halprin BLA ’44, who became a good friend. She was taught by Walter Gropius, a leader of the Bauhaus movement. While at the GSD, she met her late husband H. Peter Oberlander MCP ’47, PhD ’57 at a picnic.
Oberlander shared with the Harvard Alumni Association in 2014, “Landscape architecture is a fabulous field that is more in demand than ever,” she says. “We need to take care of our environment. We have to have places to play for children. We have to have places for recreation. It means having a corner in the city, and a bench, and a tree to sit and contemplate away from a very busy world.”
~Anita Berrizbeitia, FAAR, MLA ’87, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture
You can read more about Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s life and legacy as published by the New York Times.
Photo below: Cornelia Hahn Oberlander BLA ’47 (center) at a GSD event in 2014 with Peter Walker MLA ’57 (second from the right) and Gary Hilderbrand MLA ’85 (far right).
Acelab, an information marketplace of building products for architects, manufacturers, contractors, and clients founded in 2019 by Vardhan Mehta MAUD ’21 and MIT alumnus Dries Carmeliet, recently announced it had raised $3.5 million in investment from institutional investors and industry angels. Among participating investors in its first round of funding were Pillar VC, Alpaca, Draper Associates, MIT MET fund, Emily Fairbairn, and Erik Jarnryd.
As architectural designers, Mehta and Carmeliet recognized the vast numbers of hours architects spend gathering information on building products—“from sifting through manufacturing brochures and spec sheets to contacting salespeople with questions about product specs, pricing, and availability,” says Mehta. He notes that Acelab allows architects to “spend more time designing, and less time on the busy work involved in product sourcing and specifying” and manufacturers to “increase visibility and get in the spec.”
Acelab is currently running pilot partnerships with a select group of architecture and manufacturing firms in the US to prepare for its general availability launch.
Daniel Fetner, principal at investing firm Alpaca VC, explained the need for a tool like Acelab, describing it as a way to automate the “manual and time-consuming process of sourcing building materials and drafting spec sheets.” Pillar VC’s Russ Wilcox elaborated, saying, “It’s challenging for architects and building products manufacturers to coordinate, especially in this time of supply chain interruptions. Acelab’s platform makes it easy for everyone to stay on the same page. Architects can select and specify exactly the right products, manufacturers can sell more efficiently, and builders waste less time returning wrong orders.”
Last year, Acelab won the Harvard Real Estate Venture competition, received grants from MIT DesignX and MIT Sandbox, and was a finalist in Harvard Innovation Lab’s President’s Innovation Challenge. Currently, Acelab is running pilot partnerships with a select group of architecture and manufacturing firms in the US to prepare for its general availability launch.
When Yoni Angelo Carnice MLA ’20 first visited Cayuga Playground in San Francisco, he was struck by a wooden sculpture of a woman dressed in the traditional Filipino Maria Clara gown, with a graceful elegance that reminded him of his grandmother. The distinctively personal atmosphere of the park stayed with Carnice, and later became the basis of his year-long research project, “Eden of the Hinterlands: Reclaiming Asian-American Garden History,” under the Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, sponsored by the Garden Club of America and the Landscape Architecture Foundation.
Before coming to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Carnice worked in ecological restoration and climate-based policy work. “I was doing very regimented invasive plant removal, and planting native plants, in a more binary way.” He sought a more fluid, holistic approach to landscape architecture. His time at the GSD and his experience at Cayuga Playground, which “weaves landscape narratives, plants, and architecture together in a beautiful way,” was a revelation. Located in the Outer Mission district, it is an unexpected, idiosyncratic gem in a city dominated by “mow and blow” parks. And it is largely the work of one man, Demetrio Braceros, a Filipino immigrant who became Cayuga’s gardener in 1986.
Read the full story on the GSD website.
Arielle Assouline-Lichten MArch ’13 is featured on HBO Max’s new design competition TV show Ellen’s Next Great Designer. Her furniture designs received accolades throughout the 6 weeks of challenges, landing her a finalist in Los Angeles to design a full collection in just four days. Arielle plans to introduce some of the pieces into her current body of work, under her brand name Slash Objects.
Read more about the show and her new work in Surface Magazine: “Undeterred by her second-place finish on Ellen’s Next Great Designer, the Brooklyn-based founder of Slash Objects is heralding a promising new chapter by dialing into her newfound flow state to fine-tune her most well-received pieces.”
Follow on social media @slashobjects @arielleassouline-lichten
Seven GSD alumni have been elevated by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) as fellows for their exceptional contributions to the landscape architecture profession and society at large. Election to the ASLA Council of Fellows is among the highest honors the ASLA bestows on members and is based on their “works, leadership and management, knowledge, and service.” ASLA will formally recognize its 2021 Class of Fellows during the annual conference in Nashville on Sunday, November 21.
Congratulations to the GSD alumni in the 2021 Class of Fellows (pictured below left to right).
For the full list of 2021 Fellows, click here.
Hou de Sousa has been named a 2021 Design Vanguard by Architectural Record magazine. The studio is headed by Nancy Hou MArch ’08 and Josh de Sousa MArch ’08.
Architectural Record annually “honors 10 emerging practices advancing issues of form, construction, sustainability, and community engagement.”
“Architecture is a constant struggle,” says Josh de Sousa, 39, partner with his wife, Nancy Hou, 39, in the Manhattan firm Hou de Sousa. Adds Hou: “We like the process of finding the answer that solves all the competing forces in a project. It’s sort of an experiment every time.” This explains why Hou de Sousa enters so many competitions—it won nine in the past three years (mostly for installations in public spaces), including one during the pandemic, a welcome opportunity in a time when many architects have lost work.” Click here to read the full article.
You can find Hou de Sousa on Instagram.
Architect, urban designer, and academic Quilian Riano MArch ’09 has been appointed the new assistant dean within Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture. He will assume the role on July 12, 2021. Reporting to School of Architecture Dean, Dr. Harriet Harriss, Riano will work across all four of the school’s departments to help develop and amplify the research-driven, spatial outcomes with real-world impact that have come to distinguish the school’s ambitions and resulted in growing recognition from independent ranking systems. Riano will also assist in the advancement of the school’s established partnerships with city and government agencies, community groups, academic and cultural institutions, and construction industry leaders to ensure that the school continues to be positioned to powerfully advance pedagogy, public policy, and professional practice.
You can find Quilian Riano @quilian
Each year, the Kohn Pedersen Fox Foundation sponsors a series of fellowships to support emerging designers and advance international research. Two recent Harvard Graduate School of Design graduates and one current student are recipients of 2021 fellowships. Cynthia Deng MArch/MUP ’21 and Kofi Akakpo MArch ’21 were awarded the Paul Katz Fellowship, an internationally recognized award that honors the life and work of former KPF principal Paul Katz, while De Qian Huang MArch ’22 received the Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship, established to broaden the education of a design student in their last year of school through a summer of travel and exploration.
The Paul Katz Fellowship is awarded to international students studying issues of global urbanism and is open to students enrolled in a masters of architecture program at five East Coast universities at which Katz studied or taught: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania. KPF focuses each annual iteration of the Paul Katz Fellowship on a different global city. This year’s fellowship is tied to Cape Town; previous cities include Mexico City, Tel Aviv, Sydney, London, and Tokyo. Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, KPF has announced that they will pause any travel requirements, and will distribute $15,000 of the $25,000 travel stipend as a financial award to each of the winners.
The Traveling Fellowship is given to students from one of the 27 design schools with which KPF has partnered to fund summer research on “far-reaching topics that push the boundaries of critical thinking and architectural design.” KPF has paused travel for the Traveling Fellowship also, and has awarded a scholarship to each winner to fund a “Journey of the Mind.” Huang is one of five winners of the 2021 cycle. Tiange Wang MArch I ’22 received an Honorable Mention.
For the Paul Katz Fellowship, Deng submitted a research proposal—“Joints, Junctions, Patches, and Sutures: Spatial Repair of Past and Future”—that connects spatial reparations and adaptive reuse in the context of Cape Town’s legacies of apartheid. “The proposal was influenced by some of the research that went into by my joint thesis, ‘Care Agency: a 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair,’ completed with Elif Erez MArch I/MDes HPDM ’22 and advised by Lisa Haber-Thomson and Lily Song,” says Deng. “I also spent time thinking about what Mabel Wilson has said and written about the idea of radical repair and found inspiration from the work of Euneika Rogers-Sipp Loeb ’16, including her Digging Du Bois project journey and her thinking on reparations ecologies.”
In her proposal Deng asks, “Can the physical repair joints paired with oral histories speak to larger and more transformative repairing forward—such as repairing a Eurocentric architectural discourse in which African ingenuity is largely missing; repairing persistent segregation and lingering trauma bourne of apartheid; repairing ecological relationships ‘where clouds gather’ (the indigenous Khoe translation for the area known as Cape Town)?”
Akakpo’s research proposal, “Reclaiming Beauty in African Architecture,” addresses the need to recover and properly define an African architecture that is independent of Eurocentric standards and colonialism. “Born in Ghana, West Africa, I am intrigued by the way in which people imagine and dream beyond their means,” Akakpo writes in his project brief. “I will focus my documentation and analysis on how public and private spaces are created, how spatial territories are navigated, and how difficult spaces are humanized, personalized and made livable through design.”
This year’s recipients follow a legacy of GSD students who have been honored with KPF fellowships, including Paul Katz Fellowship winners Yotam Ben Hur MArch ’20 in 2020, Miriam Alexandroff MArch ’19 and Peteris Lazovskis MArch ’20 in 2019, and Sonny Xu MArch/MLA ’18 in 2018, and KPF Traveling Fellowship winner Eduardo Martínez-Mediero Rubio MArch ’19 in 2018.
Learn more about the fellowships, lectureships, and education-focused programs the KPF Foundation organizes each year.
Below: Image from Kofi Akakpo’s thesis “‘Functional Follies’ for an Urban Slum,” which proposes the erection of a series of “functional follies” in Agbogbloshie, an urban slum in Accra, Ghana.
The LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction awarded Soledad Patiño’s MAUD ’20 project “Transitioning infrastructures for sanitation equity” as the first prize in the Next Generation category for Asia Pacific. The proposal was developed as part of a studio and research led by Rahul Mehrotra MAUD ’87, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization. It was conducted at the GSD during 2019 and aims to bring social and economic legitimacy to waterfront settlements of Mumbai through a new network of sanitation and community infrastructure.
The international LafargeHolcim Awards recognize exemplary sustainable construction projects and visionary ideas from nearly five thousand submissions by applicants around the world in 2020. “The project suggests new multipurpose infrastructures,” said the jury. “These give rise to new dynamics of water, waste, and energy management within the community, that offer a high potential in generating sustainable businesses and a strong basis for circular economy models”. Read the full press release.
You can find Soledad Patiño on Instagram @solepatino_
The third edition of Andrew Pressman’s MDes ’94 book, Professional Practice 101: A Compendium of Effective Business Strategies in Architecture, was published by Routledge in June 2021.
According to the publisher’s website: “With its unique focus on links between design thinking and practice, this third edition brings an inspiring and fresh perspective to the myriad issues involved in successful architectural practice. The process of providing architectural services in today’s constantly evolving practice environment must be just as creative, intellectually rigorous, and compelling as wrestling with design problems.” You can find more information here.
Gandong Cai’s MLA ’17 post-pandemic public space renewal proposal “Big Apple, Small Plug-in” will be exhibited in the Media Architecture Biennale 2020 from June 28 to July 2. The proposal is the first prize award-winning scheme for the Pandemic Architecture International Competition, aiming to provide new social distancing guidance and DIY infrastructure for using the public space in New York City in the new normal period. Read more information here and here.
You can find Gandong Cai on Instagram at donchoi0702.
DAAM has been recognized as one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard winners for 2021. The annual award series by Architectural Record showcases the best emerging architecture firms from around the world. DAAM is a Chicago-based architecture and design practice led by Elyse Agnello MArch ’14 and Alex Shelly MArch ’13. Recent projects encompass a variety of scales, from objects and material investigations to residential, commercial, and community-based projects. Read the full press release.
Sekou Cooke MArch ’14 has been named a W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University as part of its 2021-2022 class of Fellows. Cooke is Assistant Professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture and a member of the GSD’s Alumni Council. In residence as a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year, Cooke will be at work on 3D Turntables Remix: The Architectural Technology of Hip-Hop.
Find Sekou Cooke on Instagram at sekou21.
Masamichi Ueta MDes ’18, a first-class registered architect in Japan, and Takafumi Inoue, AICP, MUP ’18 co-founded KUROFUNE Design Holdings upon their graduation from GSD in 2018 with the aim of implementing socially meaningful designs and products that contribute to the public. U Share is one of the key businesses that the company has been developing since its foundation.
U Share, an international student dormitory in Japan, attempts to design an optimal living environment that integrates living space and learning space, in which students, the next generation of global talents, can live together.
In the long run, U Share contributes to building a society where diverse people thrive, through nurturing global talents who have a global perspective, respect diversity, and work on solving social problems. These goals will be accomplished by designing an environment where residents can come into contact with diverse people and values, and have the opportunity to “share” their dreams and initiatives on a daily basis.
Design Studio YEN TING CHO, founded by Yen-Ting Cho MDes ’09, won Gold at the International Design Awards (IDA) for its 2021 New York City scarf collection. YEN TING CHO uses its own digital technology that responds to body movement to manipulate images and create unique patterns. Full of colour and movement, YEN TING CHO patterns are digitally-printed onto the finest materials for fashion accessories and interior design products.
With submissions from over 80 countries, the 14th annual IDA awards recognize, celebrate, and promote exceptional design visionaries worldwide. “The jury recognized its highly innovative and experimental creative processes; YEN TING CHO dares to combine digital technology and art to explore complex pattern and color combinations, leading to the creation of unique and beautiful designs.”
YEN TING CHO Studio was founded by lead designer Yen-Ting Cho in London in 2016. A designer and artist, Yen-Ting Cho is a graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design (MDes) and the Royal College of Art, London (PhD). He worked as a designer in America, Asia and Europe prior to establishing YEN TING CHO Studio. Based in London, the Studio also has a design team in Tainan City, Taiwan, where Yen-Ting is also Associate Professor of Design at National Cheng Kung University. Recent commissions and exhibitions include Camden Arts Centre (London), Manchester Science Festival, and curation of ‘Movement – Pattern – Object’ exhibition for the Taiwan Design Expo.
For more information, please see the press release.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Dwayne Oyler MArch ’01 and Jenny Wu MArch ’01 the 2021 Architecture Award. Dwayne and Jenny are the founders of Oyler Wu Collaborative, an experimental architecture and design firm in Los Angeles, CA. The firm approaches architecture and design with a critical and rigorous intent that challenges the typical vision of the built environment. Recent works encompass a variety of scales, from products and installations to residential and institutional buildings.
Read the full press release.
James A. Lord, FASLA, MLA ’96 was recognized with a 2020 American Architecture Award in the Urban Planning/Landscape Architecture category for his firm Surfacedesign‘s work at Auckland International Airport. San Francisco-based Surfacedesign, co-founded by Lord and Roderick Wyllie, ASLA, MLA ’98, designed ongoing landscape improvements through 2044 for six square miles in and around Auckland International Airport. As lead project designer, Lord said, “Our ecological landscape design is culturally rooted, informed by New Zealand’s centuries-old agrarian traditions from its indigenous Maori settlers and European immigrants in the 1800s. This is our most intricate project to date, and we are honored to win the prestigious American Architecture Award.”
Read the full press release.
In 2020, Esther Choi MDes ’08 began Office Hours, a socially-engaged art project that facilitates group conversations between emerging and notable architecture and design practitioners that identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In its 75-minute bimonthly sessions, the series offers free information, mentorship, and professional advice that address the barriers to entry and success for BIPOC practitioners in an intimate format. The series has been attended by over two thousand BIPOC designers in thirteen countries. Office Hours operates as an independently-led project under the fiscal sponsorship of The Architectural League of New York. It has received media coverage in Architizer, Architectural Digest, Dezeen, Architect, and the Architect’s Newspaper. (www.office-hours.design)
Diane Lipovsky MLA ’10 and Stacy Passmore MLA ’18 have joined forces to start the Colorado-based landscape architecture practice, Superbloom. As friends and colleagues at Civitas in Denver, Diane and Stacy discovered they shared a similar passion for the future of landscape architecture in the American West. They founded Superbloom as a commitment to crafting meaningful connections between people and the land through the practice of transformative design. The name of their practice refers to the desert superbloom, and the latent potential for design to create spectacular future natures. Working across scales and on sites from urban landscapes to the dramatic prairie and high alpine forests, their work focuses on collaborative designs for cultural and ecological landscapes.
Follow on Instagram @studiosuperbloom
Cincinnati University Press published “Exploring the Architecture of Place in America’s Farmers Markets” authored by Kathryn Clarke Albright MDes ’94. The book explores the elusive architectural space of beloved community-gathering places. Architect, teacher, and founder of the Friends of the Farmers Market, Kathryn Clarke Albright combines historically informed architectural observation with interview material and images drawn from conversations with farmers, vendors, market managers and shoppers. Albright presents in-depth case studies to demonstrate how architectural elements and spatial conditions foster social and economic exchange between vendors, shoppers, and the community at large. Albright looks ahead to an emerging typology—the mobile market—bringing local farmers and healthy foods to underserved neighborhoods. The impact farmers markets make on their local communities inspires place-making, improves the local economy, and preserves rural livelihoods. Developed organically and distinctively out of the space they occupy, these markets create and revitalize communities as rich as the produce they sell.
Sarah Holton, AIA, LEED AP, MArch ‘06 has been promoted to Senior Associate at CO Architects in Los Angeles, CA. Sarah is an emerging leader at CO, specializing in K-12 education design. She joined the firm in 2015 and brings wide-ranging experience in residential and retail projects. Her recent projects include the state-of-the-art Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University, which is the first new school of medicine in New Jersey in more than 50 years, and the award-winning University of Arizona Health Sciences Innovation Building in Tucson. CO Architects has been nationally and internationally recognized with more than 175 awards for innovative design and project delivery, including the American Institute of Architects California’s Architecture Firm of the Year Award.
Yujia Wang MLA ’17, professor and founding principal of Yi-Chang Landscape and Planning, has recently been named on the Forbes China 30 Under 30 List, becoming the first landscape architect to be given such recognition. This year’s list includes young and outstanding individuals across China in 10 categories, with Yujia named in “Art, Fashion, Lifestyle, and Food.” Forbes publishes the 30 Under 30 List every year to recognize people under the age of 30 who have been impactful in their practice and have shown the potential to become leaders in their fields. The list includes entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals in the performing arts, sports, technology, and cultural circles. Prof. Wang and his firm, Yi-Chang Landscape and Planning have been making an impact in high-profile urban public spaces. The firm has designed and delivered several important linear parks, including a riverfront park and a greenline park in Dongguan, China, with a combined length of over 20 km. Besides being an academic and a practitioner, Wang serves on committees at the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), including his appointment on the Committee on Education, Climate Action Committee, and leadership on the International Professional Practice Networks. Recently he has been leading the effort on a national virtual lecturer database aimed at promoting connection and contribution between the professional and educational realms.
“I am honored to be named on the Forbes 30U30 List as the first landscape architect,” Said Wang in a previous interview, “It has been an amazing journey.” He credits his achievement on the decision to “embrace…risks.” He said that “Working with governments to envision and realize key city public space projects, and then witnessing the positive energy it injects into the city and the environment is just incredible.” He also emphasizes the importance of being able to contribute to larger disciplinary initiatives and represent communities. Wang recently traveled to Shanghai to attend the Forbes Conference and Award Ceremony.
Read the full press release in Chinese.
Follow Wang on Linkedin
Nader Tehrani MAUD ’91, Meejin Yoon MAUD ’97, and Theaster Gates LF ’11 will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters during its virtual award ceremony on May 19 at 7 p.m. EST.
Membership in the Academy is limited to 300 architects, visual artists, composers, and writers who are elected for life. The honor of election is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers.
A recent exhibition with the West Vancouver Art Museum (WAM) showcased work across the seventy-plus-year career of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander BLA ’47. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Genius Loci explored how the theme of environmental stewardship weaves throughout her work, drawing on four distinct areas. The WAM described the exhibition thus:
“Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is among the most eminent landscape architects in the world, known for many projects in Canada and abroad. Genius loci, meaning the protective spirit of a place, is embodied in the seven decade span of her work. Her landscape designs demonstrate her desire to create terrains that are less an interruption and more an amplification of what already exists on a site. At a time when our relationship to the earth is of paramount importance, Oberlander’s projects reveal consistent and significant stewardship of the natural environment. This bilingual (French and English) exhibition introduces projects by Oberlander, which are presented in four sections devoted to playgrounds, social housing, public and residential projects, showing photography of the places alongside her sketches, plans and research proposals.”
A team of Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni is selected as one of the three finalists in the Urban Confluence Silicon Valley Design Competition held by the San José Light Tower Corporation. The design team named CO-MILIEU includes Qinrong Liu MArch ’20, Ruize Li MArch ’20, Yuting Zhang MAUD ’17, Evelyn Cheng Zeng MArch ’18, Vincent Zishen Wen MLA ’19 and Qiaoqi Dai MLA ’19 along with a lighting design group led by Yutong Jiang MDes ’21 and Sijia Zhong MLA ’21. The goal of the competition is to build an innovative iconic world-class landmark for San Jose and Silicon Valley. With an inverted void tower and blurred pixelated matrix, the team’s proposal, “Nebula Tower,” envisions a soft, dynamic, and adaptive contemporary landmark that works as a nebula incubator for new artistic possibilities and celebrates Silicon Valley’s history of technology innovation. Through the medium of light, Nebula Tower recalls the collective memory of its home to build a bridge between past and future. Inspired by the diverse geographical characters along the bay area, the proposal reimagines the Arena Green as a common ground where the natural realm and urban fabric are enriched by their interaction to embrace the co-living of diversities and utilizes innovative adaptability that can secure a sustainable future for San Jose – culturally, environmentally, and economically.
More information about the “Nebula Tower” proposal and the upcoming public meetings of Urban Confluence Competition are available on the competition website.
The Kibera Public Space Project (KPSP) has been named a finalist in the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities. Convened by the World Resources Institute, The Prize for Cities is the premier global award celebrating and spotlighting transformative urban change. KPSP was selected as one of 5 finalists among 262 submissions from 54 countries. KPSP is designed and planned by Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a non-profit design and community development firm co-founded and led by Chelina Odbert MUP ’07. A network of 11 public spaces across the informal settlement of Kibera, in Kenya, KPSP creates much-needed public space linked with other benefits, including economic development, public health, and water management.
More information on the project is available on the KDI website.
Konstantina Tzemou MAUD’18 and DEPÓLIS received 1st Prize in the International Competition for the design of Independence Square in Podgorica, Montenegro. The project consists of 40,000 square meters of public and retail space and a parking garage in the center of Montenegro’s capital and is managed by Capital City Podgorica. This prize marks the first international recognition for the firm DEPÓLIS which was launched in September 2020 by Konstantina Tzemou and Tommaso Bernabò Silorata. The team currently operates between Rome, Italy and Athens, Greece.
You can find more information on the proposal for Independence Square and current work at DEPÓLIS on their website.
Six GSD alumni have been elevated by the 2021 Jury of Fellows from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to its prestigious College of Fellows. The honor recognizes architects who have “achieved a standard of excellence in the profession and made a significant contribution to architecture and society on a national level.”
The GSD congratulates:
For the full list of 2021 Fellows, visit the AIA website.
This past fall, David Buckley Borden MLA ’11 joined the faculty of the College of Design’s School of Architecture and Environment at the University of Oregon as a visiting professor.
In addition to teaching studio and environmental-communication coursework through the lens of his practice, David will spearhead a new design-ecology initiative between the Department and the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, a 16,000-acre Long-Term Ecological Research site in Oregon’s western Cascades Mountains. As a Harvard Forest Associate Fellow David will continue to collaborate with Harvard researchers to champion a cultural ecology supported by interdisciplinary environmental-communication. David also continues to work with landscape architecture firms as a consultant, including recent collaborations with Agency Landscape + Planning, Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architects, Sasaki, and Rios.
Projecting Fellows, a symposium which brings together fellows from American architecture schools to explore the emergent interests of a new generation of architects and academics, launches on Tuesday, January 5, 2021. Co-organized by Katie MacDonald MArch ‘16, the free, virtual, five-evening series ran on Tuesday evenings from January 5 to February 2, 2021 and included presentations by Zannah Matson MLA ‘15, Eduardo Mediero MArch ‘19, and Zahra Safaverdi MArch ’17. The events roster of moderators includes Sekou Cooke MArch ’14 and Felipe Correa MAUD ’03.
Videos of all of the symposium events can be viewed for free on demand from the Projecting Fellows website.
Ryn Burns, RA, LEED GA, MDes ’13 was highlighted in an Architect Spotlight by NCARB. Ryn is the Design Director at MG2 Design and a board member of Black Land Ownership, a grassroots organization based in Brooklyn, New York.
To see the full interview with Ryn, where he highlights the importance of diverse narratives in improving the built environment and shares some of his experiences, visit the NCARB site.
Jennifer Ly MArch ’14 and James Leng MArch ’13 were recipients of a Graham Foundation grant for their project “Veil Craft,” an architectural installation that reimagines Los Angeles’ Craft Contemporary courtyard.
According to the Graham Foundation website, the project utilizes, “construction scaffolding textiles [to explore] untapped aesthetic potentials of this utilitarian material and activate the public’s interest in the overlooked materiality of our built environment.”
For a full description of the project and Jennifer and James’ work together, visit the Graham Foundation’s site.
L. Renee Blount MLA ’17 was interviewed by and featured on the cover of Outside Magazine this past fall. Since her graduation from the GSD, L has become a strategy consultant and photographer. L is well-known for her Instagram account, @ubranclimbr, where she shares photos and stories of her outdoor adventures and career.
She shares that Black joy is central to her work, saying, “My smile is very integral to who I am, and I want to share the things that make me smile in that way. There is so much negative imagery of people who look like me, and it can get really tiring and overwhelming to see our bodies portrayed that way. People need to see Black people being joyous. More importantly, we need to see ourselves being happy and joyfully reclaiming spaces.”
Although he’s been teaching design in Rome for years, Tom Rankin MArch ’91 shared with us that “this year was a bit different” and reached out with some examples of 2020 summer courses he helped to coordinate. Tom commented that he was “especially lucky to get many classmates and colleagues to join remote conversations through Zoom,” and has shared these conversations as well. “It’s exciting to hear how so many of us are pushing the limits of remote learning and practice,” Tom said in his update.
You can view a video for a Rome course here and a video from the Abruzzo course here. His remote conversations are also available on YouTube in this playlist.
For more information on Tom’s practice, visit his website.
On Friday, December 11, 2020, pioneering landscape architect Carol Johnson MLA ’57 passed away at age 91. She is widely remembered as a trailblazer in landscape architecture and one of the first women to reach prominence in her field. She founded her firm, Carole R. Johnson Associates, in 1959 and operated the business out of her apartment for the first 11 years of its existence. Carol was the first American woman to receive the American Society for Landscape Architecture (ASLA) Medal, in 1988.
In a memorial article dedicated to Carol’s extraordinary life and career, The Architect’s Newspaper says:
“After establishing a landscape architecture practice in an era when licensed women landscape architects were virtually nonexistent in the United States, Johnson went on to dramatically expand her eponymous firm while overseeing the design of numerous public parks, waterfront revitalization projects, and college campuses in and around—but not exclusively to—Boston. This includes the John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, a five-acre green space nestled along the Charles River in Cambridge that opened to the public in May 1987. The park is currently in need of various forms of maintenance and was included in Landslide 2020: Women Take the Lead, the latest edition of TCLF’s comprehensive annual report spotlighting imperiled landscapes. In 2006, Charles A. Birnbaum, president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, interviewed Johnson for an extensive oral history of her life and career. … Her legacy is indelible.”
George Ranalli MArch ’74 and his partner, Anne Valentino, were interviewed for FLOORNATURE about their longstanding practice together. The interview is hosted by architectural Virginia Cucchi, host of All Good Vibes, a podcast that “redefines sustainable architecture, projects, and space according to an augmented concept of beauty.” You can listen to the podcast in its entirety here.
Patty Heyda MArch ’00 has published an essay with The Conversation about the crises faced by the USPS in 2020 and its consequences. In her essay, Patty assesses the threats posed to democratic ideals and social cohesion in the American City.
The article, “A dismantled post office destroys more than mail service,” is available to read on The Conversation’s website.
David De Celis MArch ’98 was published in the July 2020 volume of the peer-review journal Interiority. The issue was specially dedicated to design thinking in the COVID era. Mr. De Celis’ article, “The Charms of an American Queen Anne,” explores how COVID-19 impacts the way we consider the architecture of interior space through the lens of the 1886 Queen Anne in which David and his family reside and work. The article examines how and why the Queen Anne became ubiquitous in New England and proposes that its innate flexibility may be especially helpful today.
You can read David’s article in a digital download from the Interiority site.
On October 8, 2020, International Federation of Landscape Architects President James Hayter announced that Kongjian Yu DDes ’95 would be the winner of the 2020 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, the highest honor bestowed by the IFLA.
The award, named after British landscape architect and founding president of IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, celebrates a living landscape architect “whose achievements and contributions have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of society and the environment and on the promotion of the profession of landscape architecture.”
In a release, the IFLA highlights Mr. Yu’s work as founder of Turenscape, one of the first and largest private architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism practices in China:
“For over 20 years Yu has spent his academic career fighting against deteriorating urban ecologies and the environment. His pioneering research on Ecological Security Pattern (1995) and Ecological Infrastructure, Negative Planning and Sponge Cities (2003) has been adopted by the Chinese government as a framework for nationwide ecological protection and restoration campaigns.
“Yu defines landscape architecture as the art of survival. A native of China’s Zhejiang Province, he drew on inspiration from his childhood farming experience and the ancient wisdom of water and waste management to design and test a series of nature-based solutions.”
For more information on Mr. Yu’s accomplishments and commentary from the Jellicoe Award jury, visit the IFLA site.
In a course co-taught by Lane Duncan MDes ’87 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, students from all majors and graduate areas learn the foundations of design through creative expressions of the natural world. The course, entitled “Drawing on Design,” focuses on five tenets of Design Behavior, encouraging students to explore them in a way related to their primary area of study while drawing on natural subjects. This is the second year that the course has been offered and an article from the school notes that it “is a welcome change of pace” for many students that allows them to “tap into their creativity while exploring design principles of the world around them.” For more details about the course, see the full article published on the Georgia Tech news website.
GSD Alumni Robert Pietrusko MArch ’12 and Katy Barkan MArch ’10 are among the recipients of the 2020 Rome Prize and Italian Fellowships granted by the American Academy in Rome. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities.
Robert was awarded in Landscape Architecture and Katy in Architecture.
More information about the Rome Prize and this year’s recipients is available through their press release.
Catherine Murray MLA ’86 has been appointed as a Principal at Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects (SNHA).
Of the appointment, Timothy Conner, AIA LEED AP, SNHA Principal said: “We are excited to welcome Catherine Murray as our newest Principal at SNHA. In recent years, a new sort of design work has emerged with our large technology clients. With this work comes advanced forward-thinking and next-level strategic planning, analyzing, and researching new ways to create. Catherine joins us to help lead these new initiatives while bringing a new voice and a new perspective to the broader leadership of the firm.”
The firm celebrates “her ability to creatively tackle complex design challenges” and notes that her appointment “offers our team forward-thinking and next-level strategic planning, analyzing, and researching new ways to design and create. Catherine brings a new voice and a new perspective to the broader leadership of the firm.”
We offer our congratulations to Catherine and the Sheehan Nagle Hartray firm.
American pharmaceutical group Merck (known as MSD in Europe) has announced that it intends to build a new UK headquarters across from the King’s Cross station in collaboration with Precis Advisory, Architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, and AKT II engineering consultancy. GSD community-members are represented across the project at all three collaborative partners, most prominently Faaiza Lalji MDes ’13 who is the Planning and Development Director of Precis Advisory.
The project would put special focus on creating a structure that acknowledges and complements the history of the area while also sitting at the forefront of sustainability. A press release from Precis Advisory shares the following details of the project: “The proposed building, ten stories on Euston Road and four stories (with a fifth story set back) on Argyle Square, will deliver c 180,000 sq ft of net lettable space for MSD, would use sustainable materials and has been designed to reduce carbon emissions generated through construction, operation and future fit-out refurbishment. An innovative double-skin façade would reduce solar gain and the energy required to cool the office spaces, and includes a biophilic zone which gives visibility of plants from every workspace and from outside the building.”
An article in the Financial Times notes that “Merck’s UK hub will be its first set of labs outside the US that carry out early-stage research to discover new medicines.”
The project has not yet been finalized and is still subject to planning permission and approval.
