This spring, Harvard Graduate School of Design has turned its Druker Design Gallery, Experiments Wall, and other exhibition spaces “Inside Out,” with installations shown through a series of exterior projections on the building’s facade. The series, entitled “Inside Out,” will be screened nightly (4:00 pm to 11:00 pm, EST) through March 18, rotating through a weekly roster of shows that exhibit some recent preoccupations among Harvard GSD faculty and students, selected and curated from among an open call last November.
From March 1 through March 7, “Inside Out” presents four films highlighting student work from Farshid Moussavi’s Fall 2020 GSD option studio, “Dual-Use: The function of a 21st century urban residential block.” The studio concerned itself with the politics latent within architecture, carried out through making aesthetic decisions regarding everyday spaces, and the resultant, and profound, consequences on people’s lives. In particular, the studio explored the subject of housing combined with working from home.
Projects currently on view in “Inside Out,” drawn from Farshid Moussavi’s Fall 2020 option studio “Dual-use: The function of a 21st century urban residential block.” Clockwise from top left: “Mutating Threshold” by Dan Lu, “Dual-Use Vertical Village” by Qin Ye Chen, “Dual-Use” by Erik Fichter, “Thrive – An Ethos of Collaboration and Support” by Devashree Shah
“Inside Out” premiered in early February with a pair of three-minute projections, or “filmic studies,” produced by GSD professor Helen Han, and concludes on March 19 with a look at student work from the Department of Landscape Architecture. Han’s “Scalar Shifts: Two recent filmic studies of Jewel Changi Airport and The Clark Art Institute” proceeded through the layers and sequencing of vegetation, light, and other natural phenomena at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute grounds; its companion video, “Garden of Wonder,” offered a tour of Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport and the public space within, filmed over four days in November 2019 in collaboration with Safdie Architects. “Inside Out” proceeded with student-directed projection “Floating Between Borders” (February 15-21), presenting a futuristic, imagined look at what the world could look like without formal national boundaries—an inherent “critique of the bureaucracy of geopolitical borders,” the students write, imagining what the world could look like if people could move freely among nations.
Following the exhibition of Moussavi’s “Dual-use” studio, “Inside Out” will feature a video celebration of Womxn in Design (March 8-14); a view of select thesis projects (March 15-21) and core-studio and option-studio work (March 25-31) from the Department of Architecture; and a look at the Department of Landscape Architecture’s recent pedagogical tools (April 1-7), including 3D-printed maps, toolkits, and other physical ephemera that students have received at home this academic year.
“Inside Out” follows last fall’s “2020 Election Day at Gund Hall” presentation. Gund Hall is a perennial voting location, and this show called all residents of Cambridge’s Ward-Precinct 7-3 to vote in the November 3, 2020 election, and doubled as a wayfinding device that instructed voters where they should enter and exit the building.
To learn more about the GSD’s past and present exhibitions, visit the Exhibitions webpage.
Perkins&Will and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) today announce the launch of the Black in Design Mentorship Program pilot, an initiative that aims to promote greater representation of Black talent in the design industry. Originally conceived by students and Perkins&Will professionals at the 2019 Black in Design Conference, the mentorship program will fill a critical educational and career gap in the design profession by fostering meaningful and lasting relationships starting as early as high school.
“Design firms have a responsibility to be champions of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the profession,” says Brooke Trivas MArch ‘88, a Harvard GSD graduate and principal at Perkins&Will. Trivas serves on the firm’s diversity council and has been a part of the mentorship initiative since its inception. “Our vision for this program is to empower both high school and graduate students to understand what is possible, pursue their interests, and develop their strengths.”
The program forms three-person teams composed of one Perkins&Will professional, one Harvard GSD student, and one high school student. This arrangement enables Harvard GSD students to learn from Perkins&Will professionals and, simultaneously, hone their mentorship skills with their matched high school student. All participants will complete a 10-week curriculum with discussion topics ranging from design thinking to networking to Black design legacy.
“We have been intentional in developing this program to lay a solid foundation for future relationships to flourish,” says Laura Snowdon, dean of students and assistant dean for enrollment services at Harvard GSD. “We have paid careful attention to the development of the curriculum, and we look forward to incorporating thoughtful feedback from our pilot group to inform the future program.”
Seven individuals from each group—21 participants in total—will complete the program over the course of the year. To form the inaugural cohort of high school mentees, program organizers extended invitations to select Boston-area schools. Student volunteers from the Harvard GSD African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD comprise the graduate school leg of the program, and volunteers from Perkins&Will’s Boston studio make up the third leg. Once the pilot concludes, organizers will integrate feedback from all participants, refine the program structure and content as needed, and expand outreach through a broadened application process. Participation will be offered on an annual basis in the future.
The Black in Design Mentorship Program is the latest expression of Perkins&Will’s and Harvard GSD’s long-standing collaboration. Ongoing initiatives in support of diversifying the design profession include the Phil Freelon Fellowship and the Nagle-Johnson Family Fellowship, which was most recently awarded to Jonathan Boyce.
In an inspirational email message last week to the program participants, Harvard GSD Dean Sarah M. Whiting encouraged students to “be bold in asking the questions that are on (their) mind, be uninhibited in expressing (their) creativity, and be open to learning new and unfamiliar perspectives.”
The students and professionals responsible for developing the Black in Design Mentorship Program include:
Executive Board:
Brooke Trivas MArch ‘88, Principal, Perkins&Will
Rania Karamallah, Designer, Perkins&Will
Laura Snowdon, Dean of Students; Assistant Dean for Enrollment Services, Harvard GSD
Sebastian Schmidt Dalzon, Administrative Director, Initiatives and Academic Projects, Harvard GSD
Megan Panzano MArch ’10, Program Director, Undergraduate Architecture Studies, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Harvard GSD
Organizing Team:
Kelly Teixeira Wisnaskas, Assistant Director of Student Support and Services, Harvard GSD
Kim Wong, HR Manager, Perkins&Will
Rachael Dumas, Research Knowledge Manager, Perkins&Will
Animated illustration by Jiin Choi MLA ’23. Jiin is an illustrator and designer in her first year at the GSD. Her design depicts the quiet celebration of moonlight and natural cycles and was inspired by the reed grass fields she hiked through as a child in Korea.
Wishing the GSD’s Alumni & Friends prosperity, happiness, and good health.
After such an unfathomable year, I am glad to be welcoming a new year, one that I hope will offer renewal and connect us with the loved ones, communities, and ideas that nourish us.
One of the more uplifting moments that came from this past year was sharing our virtual programming with you and our alumni worldwide in a new way. I was heartened to see so many familiar names and faces in the Zoom rooms. I look forward to the day when we will be together again.
With kind regards,
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Anyone remember air travel? In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and international flights were hurriedly cancelled, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT) pivoted its three-year focus project, The Future of Air Travel, to respond to new industry conditions in a rapidly changing world. With the broad goal of better understanding how design technologies can improve the way we live, the project aims to reimagine air travel for the future, recapturing some of its early promise (and even glamour) by assessing and addressing various pressure points resulting from the pandemic as well as more long-term challenges.
The two participating research labs—the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL), led by Allen Sayegh, associate professor in practice of architectural technology, and the Geometry Lab, led by Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice of architecture—“look at air travel from an experiential and a systemic perspective.” As part of their research, the labs consulted with representatives from Boeing, Clark Construction, Perkins & Will, gmp, and the Massachusetts Port Authority, all members of the GSD’s Industry Advisors Group.
Pre-COVID-19 meeting with researchers and Industry Advisors. Clockwise from far left: Bryan Kirchoff (Boeing), Hans-Joachim Paap (gmp), Jan Blasko (gmp), Isa He, Humbi Song, Stefano Andreani, Andrew Witt, and Zach Seibold. Allen Sayegh, Tobias Keyl (gmp), Kristina Loock (gmp), and Ben LeGRand (Boeing) were also in attendance.
So far, the project has resulted in two research books: the Atlas of Urban Air Mobility and On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception (and its accompanying website www.airtraveldesign.guide). On Flying, by Sayegh, REAL Research Associate Humbi Song, and Lecturer in Architecture Zach Seibold, seeks “to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront”—and in so doing “prepare and design for improved passenger experiences in a post-COVID world.” The book’s accessible glossary covers topics including the design implications of the middle armrest (“What if armrests were shareable without physical contact?”); whether the check-in process could be improved by biometric scanners; the effect of customs declarations on passengers; how air travel is predicated on “an absence of discomfort” instead of maximizing comfort; and the metaphysical aspects of jet lag.
The project “examines and provides insight into the complex interplay of human experience, public and private systems, technological innovation, and the disruptive shock events that sometimes define the air-travel industry”. Consider, for instance, the security requirements of air travel in a post-COVID world—how can the flow of passengers through the departure/arrival process be streamlined while incorporating safety measures such social distancing?
On Flying acknowledges that it’s hard to quantify many of the designed elements—ranging from artifacts to spaces and systems—that affect our experience of air travel. So the toolkit methodically catalogs and identifies these various factors before speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction. A year into the project, Phase 2 will more overtly examine the context of COVID-19, considering it alongside other catastrophic events, such as 9/11, in order to better understand and plan for their impact on the industry as a whole and on passenger behavior.
Meanwhile, the Atlas of Urban Air Mobility, by Witt and Lecturer in Architecture Hyojin Kwon, is “a collection of the dimensional and spatial parameters that establish relationships between aerial transport and the city,” and it aims to establish a “kit of parts” for the aerial city of the future. Phase 1 considered the idea of new super-conglomerates of cities, dependent on inter-connectivity of air routes—specifically looking at the unique qualities of Florida as an air travel hub. The atlas investigates flightpath planning and noise pollution and other spatial constraints of air travel within urban environments. One possible solution it raises is the concept of “clustered networks,” where electrical aerial vehicles could be used in an interconnected pattern of local urban conurbations, reflecting a hierarchy of passenger flight, depending on scale and distance traveled.
Phase 2 will move into software and atlas development, expanding the atlas as well as their simulation and planning software. One intriguing aspect will be a critical history of past visions of future air travel: a chance to look back in order to look forward with fresh eyes. By studying our shared dream of air travel, the hope is to rediscover and reboot abandoned visions that may yet prove to inspire new innovations.
Armrest research from the Air Travel Design Guide: Patent for airplane seats showing ambiguity of armrest spatial “ownership” for middle seats
It’s a reminder that, not so long ago, international flight excited and inspired us—before the realities of delayed flights, lost luggage, rude customs officials, and poorly planned infrastructure stole our dreams. And that’s before we ever stepped onto the plane itself. According to the Air Travel Design Guide, the social contract of air travel has now become so skewed from the original glamorous proposition that today, “the passenger can feel as if they are at the mercy of nature, airport security personnel, or the airline cabin crew. They are directed where to go, how to move, and even when to go to the bathroom on the plane.”
Surely it can—and should—be better than this?
“We may not arrive more on time,” the team concludes, “but thanks to the introduction of better design practice—we might enjoy the experience better.”
Learn more about the Laboratory for Design Technologies and its Industry Advisors Group (IAG) partners at research.gsd.harvard.edu/ldt/
Article originally published on the GSD website and written by Mark Hooper.
Harvard GSD continues its series of virtual public lectures for the Spring 2021 semester, inviting designers and other curious viewers from around the world to join the school’s dialogue. This spring program offers topical observations, as well as launches of two new Harvard GSD publications: its redesigned Harvard Design Magazine, as well as the to-be-revealed student-run journal Pairs.
All programs will take place virtually, are free and open to the public, and require registration, and all times are listed in United States Eastern Time (ET). Please visit Harvard GSD’s events calendar for more information, including registration details.
Live captioning will be provided for all programs. To request other accessibility accommodations, please contact the Public Programs Office at [email protected].
Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden”
February 18, 7:30pm
Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood
February 23, 7:30pm
Wolff Architects
March 1, 12pm
Introducing Pairs 01: Giovanna Borasi in Conversation with the Founding Editors
March 2, 7:30pm
Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Julie Bargmann, “Modesty”
March 4, 7:30pm
Thaisa Way with Ed Eigen and Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “Think Like a Historian, Imagine Like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education”
March 5, 12pm
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address
March 9, 7:30pm
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health”
March 11, 7:30pm
Covid-19 revealed the impact of structural racism in its starkest terms. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery underscore the pernicious truth that America remains a country marred by rampant racism. The ongoing display of police brutality on Black Americans across our country shows us that we, as a nation, have turned our backs on our own. As a collective design community, we are complicit. Failure to take serious, sustained and meaningful action to effect systemic change will undermine current and future generations of Black and brown people, shattering dreams and cutting lives short.
As GSD Alumni, we have privilege and we have power. Our sphere of influence encompasses the design of the public realm, buildings, workplaces, transportation, technology, health care facilities, homes and communities.
The time to use that power is now. Let us show, through our actions, that Black Lives Matter.
As individuals, let’s take specific action within the wide sphere of our influence. Let’s make ourselves accountable for taking action against racism. Let’s examine the hiring and promotion policies of our firms – not only for future and current employees – but also for our partners and contractors. Let’s build community. Let’s mentor. Let’s make space to learn from others. Let’s donate to student financial aid that specifically supports the most impacted students in our communities.
As a community, let’s commit together.
We will actively help recruit Black and brown students, speakers, design jurists, administrators and faculty to the GSD.
We will commit to raising a meaningful fund designed to underwrite the learning journeys of future generations of Black and brown students.
We will work to dismantle structural racism by collaborating with our fellow institutions to build coalitions of change.
We will work together with the GSD and our broader communities of practice to address the systemic biases that have shaped our discourse, learning and practice for far too long.
The GSD Alumni Council is dedicated to serving this mission. Much work needs to be done. Your help is instrumental. Let’s challenge ourselves and the GSD to address the systemic biases that have disenfranchised members of our own broader community of practice for far too long.
To get involved or to share ideas, please click here.
Fallon Samuels Aidoo PhD ’17
Earle Arney MArch ’93
Kaley Blackstock AB ’10, MArch ’15
Cathy Deino Blake, FASLA, MLA ’77
Chris Bourassa AMDP ’09
Justin Chapman MDes ’12
Nina Chase MLA ’12
Renee Cheng, FAIA, AB ’85, MArch ’89
Sekou Cooke MArch ’14
Peter Coombe MArch ’88
John di Domenico MAUD ’79
John Friedman, FAIA, MArch ’90
Harry Gaveras MAUD ’97
Rickie Golden MDes ’12
Margaret Graham MDes ’03
Kevin Harris, FAIA, MAUD ’80
David Hashim MArch ’86
Edith Hsu-Chen MUP ’97
Trevor Johnson MUP ’14
Mark W. Johnson, FASLA, MAUD ’82
Jaya Kader MArch ’88
Frank Lee, FAIA, MAUD ’79
Brenda Levin, FAIA, MArch ’76
Zakcq Lockrem MUP ’10
Anne-Marie Lubenau, FAIA, LF ’12
Thomas Luebke, FAIA, MArch ’91
John A. Mann MUP ’01
Allyson Mendenhall, FASLA, AB ’90, MLA ’99
Shunsaku Miyagi MLA ’86
Jeff Murphy, FAIA, MArch ’86
Alpa Nawre MLAUD ’11
Riki Nishimura MAUD ’03
Thomas Oslund MLA ’86
Ana Pinto Da Silva MDes ’05
Ryley Poblete MArch ’14
Gil Prado AMDP ’14
Beth Roloff MArch ’14
David Rubin, FASLA, MLA ’90
Frank Ruchala, Jr. MArch ’05, MUP ’05
Paris Rutherford MAUD ’93
Eric Shaw MUP ’00
Bryan Shiles MArch ’87
Rob Stein MArch ’72, LF ’94
Zenovia Toloudi DDes ’11
Sameh Wahba MUP ’97, PhD ’02
Nick Winton MArch ’90
Kristina Yu MArch ’95
Corey Zehngebot MArch ’09
Sara Zewde MLA ’15
The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Alumni Council is pleased to honor four students with the 2020 Unsung Hero Book Prize. This year’s honorees are Yonghui Chen MDes ’18, DDes ’21, Sydney Fang MUP ’20, MPP ’20, Brittany Giunchigliani MLA ’21, and Kyle Miller MUP ’21, MPH ’21.
The Unsung Hero Book Prizecelebrates GSD students who act in selfless ways to make the School a better place. Deserving students are nominated each spring by fellow GSD students, faculty, and staff, and winners are selected by the Alumni Council. Prize recipients are recognized with a book of their selection by the Alumni Council, with a second copy donated to the Frances Loeb Library with a bookplate commemorating the awardee’s service to the GSD community.
Established in 2006, the Prize is now in its fourteenth year. This year the Alumni Council received 59 nominations for 37 students. The nomination pool included a diverse group ranging from first–year to graduating students, and spanning seven degree programs at the GSD. Two of this year’s four winners are pursuing concurrent degrees with other Harvard graduate schools.
Among many admirable traits, this year’s Unsung Heroes demonstrate through their words and actions how to put diversity, equity, and justice at the forefront of design education and extracurricular activities at the GSD. They show leadership in their work as teaching fellows, research assistants, and student group leaders, and also highlight the importance of building community through simple acts of kindness.
Yonghui Chen received a Master in Design Studies from the GSD in 2018 and is currently pursuing his Doctor of Design Studies. Heis recognized as an Unsung Hero for his contributions to the GSD’s academic community, especially as a Teaching Fellow for the Urban Planning first-year core class Spatial Analysis and the Built Environment.Yonghui’s nominators wrote:
More than an excellent Teaching Fellow, Yonghui is an amazing friend who supported us at our final reviews during our busy semester, keep in contact as a constant resource, and is just truly a gem. I know my experience at GSD would be a lot less warm and bright if it was not for Yonghui’s guidance and care for me and many other classmates.
The GSD is lucky to have such a kind and dedicated educator. If I go on to teach in the future, Yonghui will be one of the examples I hold in my head of the importance of humility and generosity in teaching.
Sydney Fang is a member of the class of 2020, having pursued a Master in Urban Planning concurrent with a Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is recognized as an Unsung Hero for her work with the course CoDesign Field Lab: Program Evaluation for Change Leadership and for her perspective as a classmate and peer. Sydney’s nominators wrote:
[Sydney’s] leadership has shaped a lot of my time at the GSD – in formal ways, with CoDesign, and informal ways in classes... Sydney doesn’t critique from the sidelines. If she sees a limitation or a weakness to something, she doesn’t just scoff at it. Instead, she works hard to build and learn with those involved, creating something better.
Sydney has a magical way of sharing her compass of justice. She models by doing. She repeatedly gives life to her values by the way she speaks up in class and the ways in which she brings the communities she is from and has worked with into any space she occupies. Sydney never forgets the front-line communities, the ones we have endless things to learn from as well as reparations to pay to as we face the climate crisis. Perhaps most importantly, these communities are at the center of any visions of the future Sydney helps imagine – and invites us to see as well.
Brittany Giunchigliani is a second-year student in the Master in Landscape Architecture program. She is recognized as an Unsung Hero for her contributions to student life and academic life at the GSD, including but not limited to her leadership role in Womxn in Design and her work as a Technical Assistant at the Fabrication Lab. Brittany’s nominators wrote:
Brittany is one of the most involved, engaged, and passionate students in our cohort. She is a fierce defender of the marginalized. She energetically dives into team projects, and she works to welcome and ease the challenges for students who speak English as a second language… The GSD is lucky to have her.
[Brittany] is really involved in making the design world better for designers. She organizes Womxn in Design workshops, lectures and events. She speaks up for equity, earnings and emotions within the design world…. She has been a savior during my time here at the GSD.
Kyle Miller is pursuing a Master in Urban Planning at the GSD concurrent with a Master in Public Health through the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. He is recognized as an Unsung Hero for his work as a Teaching Fellow, a Research Fellow in the Just City Lab, and a member of multiple student groups. Kyle’s nominators wrote:
Kyle has been integral in planning events at the GSD that promote diversity of thought, and a key figure in brokering relationships across campus and beyond. The GSD would be at a loss without him, as would I.
Kyle consistently makes time for students, helping others with academic challenges, planning extracurricular events, and helping build community outside of school. He works innumerable jobs and is an active member of multiple groups.And still, he always comes to class with brilliant contributions, charm, and baked goods for everyone. If Kyle did half of what he does for this community, he would deserve this award. The fact that he does so much is nothing short of astounding and inspiring.
Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) presents two podcast series featuring in-depth interviews with leading design practitioners from around the world. “Talking Practice,” produced by the Practice Platform, investigates the ways in which architects, landscape architects, designers, and planners articulate design imagination through practice. “Future of the American City,” from the Office for Urbanization, explores alternative futures and convenes conversations about how we live, where we live. Learn more below about both series and how to listen.
Talking Practice
Grace La MArch ’95 speaks with Paul Nakazawa.
Hosted by Grace La MArch ’95, professor of architecture and chair of the practice platform, each 40-minute episode provides a rare glimpse into the work, experiences, and attitudes of design luminaries, many of whom are GSD alumni. Comprehensive, thought-provoking, and timely, “Talking Practice” tells the story of what designers do, why, and how they do it—exploring the key issues at stake in practice today.
Episodes include:
Lyndon Neri MArch ’92 and Rossana Hu, partners and co-founders of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, and the John C. Portman Design Critics in architecture at the GSD.
Preston Scott Cohen MArch ’85, founder and principal of Preston Scott Cohen Inc, and Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture at the GSD.
Gary Hilderbrand MLA ’85, founding principal and partner at Reed Hilderbrand, and Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD.
Anna Heringer, founder and principal of Anna Heringer Architects, and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development
Shohei Shigematsu, partner at Office of Metropolitan Architects (OMA) and head of the New York office.
Paul Nakazawa, Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the GSD.
Jeanne Gang MArch ’93, founder and principal of Studio Gang, Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Reinier de Graaf, the longest non-founding partner at the Office of Metropolitan Architects and co-founder of AMO, the think tank of OMA.
Upcoming episode: Grace La speaks with Kersten Geers about his practice OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen and the meaning of architecture without content. Listen to a sneak peek below.
Listen to all available episodes and find program notes on the GSD website, or subscribe to the series via one of these podcast providers: iTunes, Android, Google, Stitcher, and Spotify.
Future of the American City
Supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and generous donors to the American Cities Fund, this series of 10 episodes lanched in May 2019; it investigates Miami and other urban areas considering issues related to urban planning, adaptation to climate change, transit, equity and more.
The most recent episode from December 2019 features Associate Professor of Architecture Eric Höweler, an architect and educator whose work deals with building technology and the public realm. He and Alumni Council member Corey Zehngebot MArch ’09 led the fall 2019 option studio “Adapting Miami Housing on the Transect,” which centered on new strategies for urban housing, focusing on the issues of typology, density, transit, and climate adaptability.
The other nine episodes include interviews with:
Sean Canty MArch ’14 is an architect and educator whose work focuses on building type and geometry. Among other things, he has recently engaged in teaching a course on reimagining housing and public space in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood.
Laurinda Spear and Margarita Blanco are architects and landscape architects whose work at ArquitectonicaGEO focuses on creating ecologically performative public spaces.
Rodolphe el-Khoury is an architect, historian, and educator whose recent work deals with smart cities and embedded technology.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is a pioneering urban planner, architect, and educator. She has been instrumental in developing the City of Miami’s form-based zoning code, Miami 21.
Craig Robins is a Miami real estate developer whose projects focus on arts, culture, and historic preservation.
Rosetta S. Elkin is a landscape architect who uses design as a means to address risk, injustice, and instability brought on by climate change.
Lily Song is an urban planner whose work aims to center the experiences of marginalized groups in the policy and development process.
Chris Reed is a landscape architect specializing in dynamic ecologies and generative processes.
Toni L. Griffin LF ’98 is an urban planner who employs a value-based approach to urbanism, examining the ways design and planning figure into to questions of equality and inclusion. Griffin’s pursuit of the “Just City” has led her across the country to push for urban design that promotes access, choice, and empowerment.
Subscribe to the series via one of these podcast providers: iTunes and Stitcher.
Megan Panzano is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she currently coordinates and teaches in the first semesters of the graduate and undergraduate programs. In 2016, Panzano received the Harvard Excellence in Teaching Award for her instruction in the Architecture Studies track for undergraduate students. This annual award, administered by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in cooperation with the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education, acknowledges a select number of Harvard instructors for the excellence of their work with students and the strength of their commitment to teaching. Panzano was honored specifically for her instruction in the studio course “Transformations,” which introduces basic architectural concepts and techniques used to address issues of form, material, and the process of making. She has subsequently gone on to earn three more of these honors in sequential semesters of teaching.
Through her independent practice, studioPM, Panzano works on an assembly of projects addressing spaces of change across a range of architectural scales. Her recent work includes “HIGH SEES,” a perceptual playground built like a boat that sits atop the roof of a preschool. She previously worked as a Senior Designer and Project Manager at Utile, Inc. and she worked closely with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at Venturi, Scott Brown + Associates in Philadelphia.
Panzano graduated cum laude from Yale University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with honors in 2004. In 2010, she received her Master of Architecture with distinction from the GSD, where she was the recipient of the John E. Thayer Award for outstanding academic achievement. She was also the 2010 winner of the GSD’s James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize for her design of a new architectural type that explored the home as an inhabitable archive—an integral site of object curation and living.
In this Q&A, Panzano shares insights into the Undergraduate Architecture Studies program, what makes the GSD MArch I model distinctive, and how she keeps busy outside of the GSD.
1. Tell us about your background.
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, though my family is not originally from there. This year marks my residency in the New England area for more years than my time living in the south, but those roots are still with me. I try to keep the south’s capacities for unconstrained imagination and reinvention alive as an overlay on the design work I’m thinking about and producing up here.
2. Why did you decide to come to the GSD for your Master of Architecture degree?
I have always been (and am still) drawn to the school’s interest in inviting diverse perspectives to address the project of architecture. The design departments that share the open space of Gund Hall under one roof is extraordinary. The GSD’s commitment to an academic community of students, faculty, and staff from different origins and disciplinary backgrounds weighed heavily on my decision to pursue my MArch I degree here.
3. Looking back, what experiences at the GSD were the most helpful in shaping your career?
Architecture, its education and practice across all of its outputs—research, writing, building, and curation—is a collective endeavor. The classmates I was lucky enough to share time with at the school, as well as the faculty who instructed and advised me throughout, were and, largely, are still the most influential and inspiring aspects of my experience at the GSD. Many of these individuals not only put on the map what was possible to pursue through design, but also continue to help me routinely tune-up my projects and approaches as I travel into new territory. This occurs through both direct and tangential dialogue about work. I value my GSD past and present friends and colleagues and our shared architectural productivity.
4. What about the GSD currently excites you?
The current faculty and students are smart, skilled, curious, and receptive. That’s an exciting combination, especially when channeled to design and it’s capacity to reveal and make legible to others new ways of seeing and engaging the world. In architecture, I am excited by the way the school is not compromising on what the architectural consequences of contemporary issues might be; the work of the school illustrates investment in the impact particular present issues have across all forms of design output, from representations to texts and built form and space—not just one. I think it’s important that the school continues to encourage the address of all of those things.
5. You serve as Program Director of the Undergraduate Architecture Studies program, which is part of Harvard College’s History of Art and Architecture concentration. What benefits do design thinking and studio-based courses offer to liberal arts students?
In my role as GSD Program Director of the Undergraduate Architecture Studies program over the past few years, we’ve seen a swell of interest in our undergraduate studio-based architectural design courses from students across the College, not just those within History of Art and Architecture, the concentration this track resides within. We now offer four design courses annually that are specifically crafted for undergraduates—two seminars and two studios—that are acutely aware of teaching architecture within the liberal arts context of Harvard College. Because of this, it’s intentionally not a pre-professional course of study. What we’ve promoted in these courses is the teaching through various scales of design experimentation what is specific to the discipline of architecture, with emphasis on architectural things that can productively ‘kiss’ other disciplines. Rather than a dilution of architecture amidst everything else, we teach through what is architecturally specific but more portable to other disciplines, namely the following three things: the visual representation of an idea through architectural means; the iterative process of design that is often a non-linear method of idea advancement—thinking making, analyzing and making again; and we also emphasize collaborative learning and skill-sharing in the more open environment of the design studio as an essential means of advancing architectural work. It is this set of architectural means and methods that stir creativity while managing the discipline’s complexities that these courses offer to liberal-arts studies at Harvard.
6. Tell us about your practice. In 2013, you founded studioPM, a design practice invested in research and production at multiple scales, which develops projects that carry a degree of change and instability with them. What drives your work?
Architecture consistently confronts contingencies—be they the temporality of activity, varied subjectivities, or a context in flux, in addition to the necessary budgetary ones. I am interested in anticipating what chance incidents my work may host or encounter and playfully teasing out those open-ended aspects as a medium with which to design in each project. Visual perception currently plays a big role in this. The visual images my recent work presents aspire to reveal and critique background assumptions of the link between what we see and what space and form we expect to get, playing with architecture’s representational conventions overbuilt terrain to produce spatial perceptions that differ from physical reality. Recent projects include a rooftop playground, a triptych of toys, body-sized anti-perspective image-objects, spaces for the animated collecting of things, a series of bike stops along a public trail, and a small vacation house by the beach. Each focuses on a particular friction of fixing specific architectural elements in static assembly that produce changing perceptions of form and space. This motivates the materiality, detailing, and making of each project in particular ways. Seam lines, surface hues, and textures of volumes within the architecture often overlap to align and perceptually press 3D space into planar readings that vary based on vantage point and time of day. Similarly, elements from the context are often brought into the visual field of the elements of the architecture rendering boundaries between within and without and the limit of interior space ambiguous. This recent work also intentionally experiments with the mobilization of architectures of modest size to address a range of bigger issues over larger territories.
7. You recently designed “HIGH SEES,” a 1,500-square-foot space” atop Arlington’s Learn to Grow preschool, which you call a “perceptual playground.” How did your interest in open-ended, unscripted play inform this project?
In the book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga describes play as intentionally useless. But, this uselessness imbues its special value. It is through its lack of prescription that play becomes a primary participant in the generation of culture. Unconstrained exploration unlocks ways of seeing the world differently, something Huizinga identifies as critical to creativity and to cultural evolution. More recent research supports this, revealing that children develop in more enriched and independent ways when given fewer guidelines for play. These sources shaped my goals for creating a space for open-ended play to promote this development through essential motor and cognitive skills for the 3-5 year old people primary to this project. In order to do so, I designed a pattern that weaves together bouncy aquatic rubber tiles with abstract custom-designed play elements to create distinct zones for unprescribed action and imagination, up on an unused roof space of the school. Its blue hues become a make-believe sea or extended sky.
Megan Panzano MArch ’10 on “HIGH SEES.”
The project was built to withstand two major forces: New England seasonal swings and preschoolers. 3D objects built of speedboat material for climbing on and hiding within emerge from the playground’s 2D surfaces, encouraging physical as well as visual play for its smaller occupants. Perspective views from various vantage points within the play space appear flat, contradicting the actual depth of space populated with layered elements. Carefully coordinated seams and edges cause play pieces to optically pop up from and flatten onto the floor and fence depending on the angle of view, tuning depth perception while illustrating, real-time, that the playground invites reinterpretation. Simply, what one ‘sees’ varies. The project architecturally promotes the power of play, left unscripted.
8. You were the Committee Chair for the 2019 Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize, a prize established by GSD advocates Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 and William J. Poorvu MBA ’58. The Prize recognizes the two top teams or individuals for a viable real estate project completed as part of the GSD curricula. Why is this award important to the GSD and the study of real estate?
First, it was an enjoyable experience to serve on this prize committee because it availed me the opportunity to get to know both Sam Plimpton and Bill Poorvu and to see their commitment to the school and the support of its students first hand. This prize is particularly of note because it’s a rare award that directly encourages students to pick up and continue work initially incubated in a GSD course or studio. It is also a unique opportunity for cross-program engagement for students—applicant teams are often assembled as a mix of students from various programs to address the advancement of their design work in relation to the prize. And, lastly, the student teams advancing to the final round of consideration for this prize are supported by the close reading of their work and insightful feedback provided in rounds of review by the stellar interdepartmental prize committee composed of faculty members from across the GSD, with whom I had the honor of working closely as well.
9. You’ve taught at both Harvard and Northeastern University and served as a guest critic at many other institutions. Is the GSD studio model unique? If so, in what ways?
Speaking from within Architecture, the GSD MArch I model is something special because of the clarity and rigor of its core sequence, inclusive of both studios and complementary core courses. If we understand ‘discipline’ to be a specific branch of knowledge with distinct material and methods as means of advancement, it is clear that each semester of the GSD MArch I core sequence articulates particular disciplinary content specific to Architecture—its materials (media and scale) and methods of working. These build up in series as means to address broader issues—from techniques of architectural representation and issues of subjectivity; the complexities of identity, access, and privilege with relation to site and program; to the integration of structure and systems within the whole body of a building; and the relationship of architecture to challenges posed by the urban condition. What IS special over these semesters of the GSD’s core sequence is that architecture is not proposing to solve these bigger issues in any one investigation, but these terms work to manifest spaces that, through their design, sharpen attention to and offer new means of considering issues of contemporary relevance.
10. Where do you go to feel inspired?
Traveling anywhere new does the trick—usually including art museums. Also, hiding away and reading about architecture, and things in its orbit, in old books (that are new to me) and in contemporary journals sparks new ideas. I’m realizing that travel may be so inspiring because flying or training anywhere allows me to get a lot of reading done…
11. What’s on your reading list/watch list/playlist right now?
The journals Cabinet and Log are always top on the reading list. Currently, I’m also reading two books by Nelson Goodman: Ways of Worldmaking and Languages of Art, with particular focus on his framing of representation’s mediation of the real world. When not reading, I’ve been listening to Stevie Wonder, whose albums I recently rescued from my playlist archive, interspersed with Billie Eilish and Cautious Clay. Occasionally, I’ve been watching episodes of Parks and Recreation to lighten up my anticipation of a tricky sequence of public process presentations I have upcoming for a series of bike stops I’ve designed that require township support to move into production.
12. What would surprise us about you?
I am in the midst of training for a triathalon to have the strength and speed to keep pace with my two boys, who are 7.5 and 2.5, and both fast.
At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), affordable housing is an urgent concern in the pursuit of healthy, equitable cities. In this video—the first in a series of brief looks at the ways in which topical issues are explored at the GSD—Rahul Mehrotra MAUD ’87, Daniel D’Oca MUP ’02, and Farshid Moussavi MArch ’91 discuss strategies for rethinking the housing needs of the 21st century.
Greetings from Cambridge! As the fourth year of the program progresses, it is a pleasure to have two cohorts of graduates out in the world. We have enjoyed hearing about your new careers and activities, and as always, we wish to keep you informed with news from the program side as well. To that end, say hello to our inaugural alumni newsletter. The theme matches the upcoming MDE publication, Mobility (academic year ’18-’19), which includes illustration/comic elements. Please see below for further updates.
We hope to see you all soon!
With warm regards,
Martin Bechthold DDes ’01 Fawwaz Habbal
Program and Student News
The program launched and awarded its first round of MDE Fellowships in summer 2019. These fellowships are awarded to second-year students, both domestic and international, and are based entirely on financial need.
Several new instructors have joined familiar faces on the MDE instruction team (read more about them here).
The studio team: Stephen Burks;Elizabeth Christoforetti MArch ’09;Luba Greenwood, Jock Herron MDes ’06, DDes ’11;Julia C. Lee;Kwanyong Seo; and Andrew Witt MArch ’07, MDes ’02.
Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP team): Martin Bechthold DDes ’01, Luba Greenwood, and Woodward Yang.
Frameworks: Woodward Yang
The program is working on launching several ventures that have been in the works for some time, including an executive education program. As these efforts come together, keep an eye out for updates.
Read Health Systems, the publication from Collaborative Design Engineering Studio I/II 2017-2018.
The academic year ’19-’20 theme is waste, which we kicked off with a field trip to Save That Stuff.
Join the official MDE LinkedIn Group to see career info from current students and other alumni.
Consider indicating your availability as a mentor for current students through the Alumni Directory.
Alumni News
This past April, Autodesk hosted the SERT Council Event in San Francisco, which introduced MDE to a broader audience of GSD and SEAS alumni. Special thanks to Zeerak Ahmed MDE ’18, Neeti Nayak MDE ’18, and Chao Gu MDE ’18 for participating in the event.
This November, the GSD hosted the Dean’s Leadership Council in NYC. Karen Su MDE ’18 presented for MDE.
We are thrilled to see new ventures launched by MDE alumni, including artnext by Julian Siegelmann MDE ’19 and Naya by Vivek Hv MDE ’19 and Saad Rajan MDE ’19. From the 2018 cohort, Jeremy Burke MDE ’18 and Ramon Gras MDE ’18 recently released The Atlas of Innovation Districts, and Michael Raspuzzi MDE ’18 continues to move forward with Culinary AI Labs.
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Four generations of MDE came together over donuts and coffee
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Email us! Shoot an email to [email protected] if you have news for the MDE website or would like to see a specific topic addressed in our next newsletter.
The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship is awarded annually to an emerging designer whose work articulates the potential for landscape as a medium of design in the public realm. The Kiley Teaching Fellow will be appointed Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design for the 2020-21 academic year, and is expected to be in full-time residence from August 15, 2020 through May 30, 2021. While the Kiley Teaching Fellowship will be awarded competitively on an annual basis, successful Fellows are eligible to have their academic appointments renewed for a second year at the rank of Lecturer, dependent upon review of their teaching, research, and creative practice.
The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship builds upon the GSD’s history of pedagogic innovation as well as the Department of Landscape Architecture’s century of leadership in landscape education. This initiative is intended to recognize and foster emerging design educators who are considering an academic career in landscape architecture and who are interested in advancing contemporary discourse through pedagogy in core and elective curricula.
Deadline for receipt of applications: February 1, 2020
Mark LeeMArch ’95 assumed the role of Chair of the Department of Architecture and Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) on July 1, 2018. He is a principal and founding partner of Johnston Marklee, which since its establishment in 1998 has been recognized nationally and internationally with over thirty major awards. Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee span seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include the renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which opened in September 2017; the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; the design of the new Dropbox global headquarters in San Francisco; and the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, opening November 2018. Along with partner Sharon Johnston MArch ’95, Lee served as Co-Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial and participated in the GSD’s symposium “New Materialism: Histories Make Practice | Practices Make History” at the Biennial last September.
Prior to his appointment as Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD, Lee held the position of Frank Gehry Chair at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and Cullinan Guest Professor at Rice University School of Architecture, in addition to appointments at ETH (Zurich) and UCLA. Lee has taught as a design critic at the GSD since 2013, and has served as a visiting critic at institutions around the world. He was also a member of Harvard GSD’s 2018 Wheelwright Prize jury.
1. Tell us about your background.
I was born and raised in Hong Kong while it was a British Colony. In 1983, I moved to Los Angeles. I was part of the generation who left Hong Kong after Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Deng Xiaoping and confirmed that Hong Kong would return to China. A lot of my friends went to either the UK or other Commonwealth countries. I came to Los Angeles and went to the University of Southern California for my Bachelor of Architecture degree. At first, I did not intend to stay in the US, but after a while, Los Angeles began to feel like home. I worked for a couple of years after graduation, and then I came to the GSD for my MArch degree.
2. What drew you to the GSD?
GSD was at the time, and is still, head and shoulders above other schools. When I was a student in Los Angeles, I was aware of the GSD graduates who took very high profile positions within large offices, like Gehry Partners or S.O.M., and others who started their own exciting practices right away or soon after school. I was attracted to the diversity of the types of practices and positions represented by GSD alumni. The profile of GSD alumni was and is very strong. Also, Harvard as a university is an incredible attraction with the other great departments and schools. Being in this type of intellectual community has always been highly appealing to me.
3. What is the most significant thing you learned while at the GSD?
One of the things I learned at the GSD is the human dimension behind the architects we studied. When you look at architects from a distance, or when you learn of them and their work from a distance, they could come across as these towering figures. However, when you’re at the GSD, you actually get to work closely with them and know them as human beings. As a student, I had the opportunity to work with Peter Eisenman, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. You get to know them as people and understand that you can also be one of them, which is very liberating; you can achieve what they have achieved, as opposed to their being these distant deities or figures.
My first option studio was taught by Peter Eisenman, who was a visiting design critic at the time. I had the chance to work in his highly theoretical studio for fifteen weeks, which was incredibly intense. This was followed by an option studio taught by Herzog & de Meuron, which was the diametric opposite of Peter Eisenman’s but equally fantastic. It was a time before they designed the Tate Gallery in London, while they were working on incredibly important small projects such as the Goetz Collection in Munich. I had the opportunity to work with them very intimately on many aspects of the design project. Also, this was the studio where I met Sharon [Johnston MArch ’95, partner and spouse].
4. While you were a student at the GSD, did you experience classes or lectures at other Harvard schools?
I’ve always been interested in the arts and history. When I was a student at the GSD, I took a lot of classes in art history and in Sackler. I took classes with the art history professor Yve-Alain Bois and Norman Bryson, who was a visiting professor. Dave Hickey, an art critic who was also a visiting professor, was an incredible teacher. We stayed in touch over the years. These experiences really benefited mine and Sharon’s professional career later on when we were working with institutions and artists.
5. Tell us about your professional career.
My lifelong interest in modern and contemporary art has certainly shaped our career in many ways. Our first projects were in Marfa, Texas a few years after Donald Judd passed away. We started renovating houses and designing structures for poets and writers in residence for the Lannan Foundation. Over the course of a few years, we met a lot of artists or curators who were doing their residencies in Marfa. Many of them became lifelong friends and collaborators. We started helping them design their exhibitions or collaborating on their projects. Eventually, we designed houses for the collectors and museum exhibitions for their shows. Now we’re designing museums or institutions with directors and chief curators that were young curators at the beginning of their careers back then. We have been blessed with having very good friends and collaborators that we crossed paths with early on.
6. What is your vision for the Department of Architecture?
The GSD Architecture Department has always played a critical role in reflecting upon and shaping the field. Today, a lot of focus within the field has been placed upon the discipline itself, as opposed to the last thirty or forty years where there has been a general tendency of going towards the periphery of the discipline, interrogating its boundaries. Now that the so-called boundaries have been eroded, people are much more interested in the irreducible cores of the discipline itself. So with the newly demarcated and redrawn boundaries on the discipline, I would like to foster connections through strategic bridge-building between these redefined boundaries. I like to use bridge building as an analogy because bridges are much more defined and articulated than the dissolution of boundaries for the way I would like the Department of Architecture to operate within the School. How can we build bridges between different cultures? I see the GSD as the most Eurocentric school in America, and that is really our strength. This is something that needs to be preserved and expanded, but at the same time, we should consider the other bridges that we need to build in different cultures, especially into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The GSD is much more global today, and these bridges are important because of the global makeup of the GSD community and the architecture community. This will be reflected in the visitors we bring to our department, which reflect our current student body. I hope to see this in our courses and our interdepartmental work. Also, I hope to build a bridge that will promote collaboration across all departments. I look forward to working closely with Diane Davis (Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design) and Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 (Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture).
7. What is your first order of business as Chair?
I see my first year as a year of orientation. I know the GSD from when I was here as a student. I know the GSD as a visitor from the last four or five years. But, I won’t really know the GSD until I am here in the trenches. As an architect, I’m a contextualist in the sense that I always try to understand the history and the context of a site first. I’m trying to take the same approach to my chairmanship. There are a lot of things I need to learn and understand how the GSD works.
Dean Mohsen Mostafavi talks about the importance of community and the relationships between students and faculty; this is certainly something on which I would like to build. Also, junior faculty should be more connected to senior faculty, to our visitors, and the students, as they’re such an important core of our department. As part of my orientation, I’m having one-on-one meetings with faculty and staff and making myself available to the students. The foundations of core are very important, and following the tradition of Chairs of the Department, I’m serving as the coordinator of the core one studio this first semester. I see my immediate task as understanding where these foundations evolve from, and then where they could go.
Additionally, I’m planning a series of lectures that pair a junior faculty member with a visitor or senior faculty member, where I would moderate the discussion. This type of intergeneration discussion is very important. It breaks down the hierarchy. Whether one is at the beginning of their career or more advanced in their career, there may be many points that overlap. Seeing and hearing that discussion will be invaluable for both the participants and the students.
8. What do you see as the future of design education for architecture? And/or how do you see how the GSD can help shape this?
Historically, architecture has both been overestimated and underestimated. Understanding exactly what architecture could contribute to is much more empowering than thinking architecture could solve every problem in the world. Having a grasp on the limitations and possibilities of architecture demands a mastery and very delicate balance. This is something I hope could be an ethos that I’d focus on under my chairmanship.
It is important for students to learn about pacing one’s career. I recall the words of John Hejduk MArch ’53, who spoke about how there are architects who are short distance runners, and there are architects that are long-distance runners. Architecture is a marathon; it’s essential to find your colleagues, your friends, and your fellow travelers who will go along with you.
9. What are some of the biggest challenges in the field today? How might this change in the future?
Too much attention has been placed upon the exceptional buildings; the 1%. Whereas the quality of architecture for the 99% of our city fabric is quite low. There’s a big gap between what is being discussed and what we experience in the city. For architecture to have strong powers as a discourse as a cultural category, the quality of the 99% has to be raised higher. Not to take away from that 1%, but the discussion and the focus have to be much more spread out.
10. Johnston Marklee is one of the most talented practices currently working in the United States and beyond. How will you balance your role at the GSD with your practice?
I’m still learning how to balance my practice with my role as Chair; but to run the department, I have to be at the GSD in person. Johnston Marklee has opened a satellite office that is within walking distance of the school. Our main base is still in LA because we’ve been there more than twenty years, and our team is there, but we are in the process of building our Cambridge office, starting with a few GSD alumni. I would like to see my academic and professional commitments have a reciprocal relationship with one another.
Mark Lee MArch ’95 (right) with Sean Chiao MAUD ’88 at the GSD’s LA Design Weekend in 2012.
11. What value have you seen in engaging with the GSD alumni community?
I’ve been fortunate to participate in various alumni events such as the 2016 GSD reception at DesignMiami/ and several events in Los Angeles. Sharon and I have hosted talks in our office and dinners in the buildings we have designed for donors. We have also participated and returned to campus for the Grounded Visionaries campaign. These times where meaningful, not were we able to reconnect with alumni we haven’t seen in a long time, but also see former teachers; like when I saw Eduard Seckler [the former Osgood Hooker Professor of Visual Art Emeritus and Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the Graduate School of Design] and his students at the Grounded Visionaries launch. Seeing the multiple generations of alumni helps realize, as alumni and students we are part of this larger chain of the students here.
12. About what design problems are you passionate?
Often, Johnston Marklee is commissioned to do one very specific project. The ones that we’re most passionate about are the projects that have larger implications. When we get to understand that the one problem we have been trying to solve is actually a larger, global problem. The results not only serve the building that you’re designing, but could have implications on other future buildings such as challenges in zoning a house within a city or sustainable ways of construction.
Some examples are the early houses that we have built in Los Angeles. We built on difficult hillsides, and we realized that it’s not just about this house, but it’s about how we deal with the hillside ordinance, and the desire to preserve the ecology of the hillside but still allow for development to happen. Or when we built the Vault House, which we saw as a typology of how to build on the beach. Understanding these different ecologies of what architecture could do was a learning experience.
13. How has the GSD changed since you were a student?
There are pros and cons. When I was a student, you could see and feel the size of the entire community and see everyone’s face on the trays. I have not experienced any architecture school like the trays in Gund Hall where you really feel the presence of everybody. As the school has grown larger, there are more people you don’t see or people who don’t take studios. The community has become more extended, but that’s also its strength. You get a lot more people who are not just focused on architecture. I think those are the most interesting things I see at GSD right now.
GSD at the Chicago Architecture Biennial: “New Materialisms: Histories Make Practice | Practices Make History”. From left to right: Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, Mark Lee MArch ’95, and Sharon Johnston MArch ’95.
14. You along with Sharon Johnston MArch ’95 served as Artistic Directors for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial that drew over 550,000 residents and visitors from the U.S. and around the world. What was most memorable about this experience?
It was an incredible experience because it was the second year of the biennial exhibition. I feel it’s important because you need a second one to make it a biennial. It is the only North American architecture biennial and is situated in a city where architecture is so important. The duration of the show was half that of the Venice Biennial, which is the grandfather of biennials, but it drew twice as many visitors, which speaks to the interest in architecture to the general audience. We certainly tried to appeal to cognoscenti or architects, but also to the general audience. The nice thing about it was over the three months it was open, every time we went back, we saw kids, we saw students, we saw senior citizens enjoying the show. We tried to speak to many different demographics.
15. You have taught at several other universities including Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, ETH Zurich, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. What sets the GSD apart?
The difference is that the teachers at the GSD are usually the ones who actually wrote the books that are studied and referenced in other schools. Another difference is the generally high quality of the students, they are really incredible. When the students have such a high intellectual capacity, the discourse and the thinking are at a completely different level.
There are always two aspects to teaching. There’s knowledge transference; as a teacher, you have more experience than students, and you transfer that knowledge to them. Secondly, there is knowledge production, which produces new knowledge. I think that is one of the attractions for faculty to be at the GSD is not just transferring what you know, but to use this opportunity to create new knowledge or work with students to test new ideas. This calls for a high caliber of student, and Harvard has the highest caliber of students. It’s an attraction for the visiting faculty to be here too. It is really unparalleled.
16. What advice do you have for GSD students and/or alumni?
Finding your friends and finding your fellow travelers are important. When we first started our practice after we left GSD, we decided we didn’t want to be architects where our clients are people who have arrived and hire us as a trophy. We want to find our fellow travelers, and we want to travel with them—whether they are collaborators or clients. In understanding that architecture is a long distance race, you realize the importance of finding people that you share, have sympathies or empathies with what you believe in, and then travel the path of a career with them. Developing relationships and friendships is important.
17. Where do you go to feel inspired?
When I am in Southern California I like to go to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla to the structures designed by Louis Kahn. It’s a place where I feel the power of solitude. When I feel melancholic, my spirits are lifted there. When I am happy, I feel joyous there. This is the power of great architecture; it leaves you alone when you want to be, but when you want to inquire it tells you a lot, just like a good friend. That’s the quality that I see in great buildings. When I feel the need for solitude or refuge here in Cambridge, I simply walk down the block to the Carpenter Center and take a stroll through the ramp.
This Q&A is part of a series of articles profiling newly appointed department chairs. The series includes:
In December 2018, a gift from Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 and his wife, Wendy Shattuck, established the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics. The professorship will advance the GSD in the field of urban economics, fundamental for understanding the economics of cities, as well as land use, planning, and real estate decisions in urban areas. As the world’s foremost design school, the GSD is a natural home for exploring a range of urban issues and advancing this core field.
The GSD’s curriculum in urban economics will include focuses on the components and measurement of successful urban planning and development projects, including: use mix (retail, market and affordable housing, commercial, institutional); the relationships between land use patterns and property values and other metrics of success; transformations in technology and mobility infrastructures; the interactions of metropolitan-scale markets and regulatory institutions and policy; public finance; and the impacts of climate change on public and private sector decisions.
“Investments in cities and the built environment are the driving engine of growth in local, regional, and national economies here in the U.S., and around the globe,” said Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism. “If we want to create prosperous futures while also contributing to sustainable urbanism, greater attention to the drivers of urban economies should be a number one priority, both for the public and private sectors.”
This position is essential to helping build on the emphasis we’ve always had in the area of economics as it pertains to all aspects of urban growth and development. It sends a powerful message to everyone that the GSD would have such a position, as it amplifies our very long tradition of having scholars who teach urban economics.~ Richard Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development
As the field of urban economics has evolved in recent years, understanding the cultural context of urban economic growth has become increasingly important. Scholars have examined the role of arts, public space, and leisure activities in place-making, which has inspired new work on how to incorporate these priorities into urban development projects. Along with Davis, Richard Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development, describes the GSD as the perfect environment for synthesizing multiple urban objectives through creative building and urban development projects.
“This position is essential to helping build on the emphasis we’ve always had in the area of economics as it pertains to all aspects of urban growth and development,” Peiser said. “It sends a powerful message to everyone that the GSD would have such a position, as it amplifies our very long tradition of having scholars who teach urban economics.”
“Plimpton’s long-term loyalty and support of the GSD has been fundamental to the success of the program” Peiser added. “This new position is really central to supporting three of our fundamental teaching disciplines in the Department of Urban Planning and Design: urban planning, economic development, and real estate.”
Homa Farjadi, Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80, Diane Davis, Mohsen Mostafavi, and Wendy Shattuck celebrate the establishment of the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics
Frederick Chan MAUD ’74 believes that the most impactful design happens outside of the studio, and that the most important work of a graduate school is to carry out research that can shape the profession. That deep conviction in training designers of the future led to Chan’s generous gift to the GSD’s Annual Fund, which will support the School’s greatest needs.
“Harvard has been a wonderful place and experience for me,” Chan said. “I learned at the school that the tuition we pay is about one-third of the cost of educating a student. Therefore, I think it’s important that after we leave, we continue to support education to make it possible for the next generation, both in terms of financial aid and continuing participation in the school’s programs so we can learn from each other. Students are more creative when they’re not constrained.”
Chan, who describes himself as semi-retired and splits his time between Hong Kong and Bangkok, had a successful career in architecture and development. He was Managing Director at FMC Group, and president and chief executive officer at NuWest Group. In addition to his Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard, Chan also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of California Berkeley.
His experience at Harvard, including a class with Mortimer B. Zuckerman LLM ’62, and his varied background, have cultivated Chan’s appreciation for the GSD’s multidisciplinary approach, especially the GSD’s collaboration with the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
“Design is no longer a profession by itself, and urban problems or problems in modern society can’t be tackled by one discipline,” Chan said. “Issues are so complicated and specialized, and you can’t design in a vacuum. Training in design should enable the student to learn how to work and collaborate with people from different fields.”
“I have always thought that design should be part of the core educational curriculum in our schools along with language skills and math,” he continued. “We can use design as a way both to learn and come up with solutions and communicate with others. In an increasingly visually-oriented world, design is taking on a more important role.”
Even a world away from Cambridge, Chan maintains his connections to the GSD in several ways: speaking to students, watching every commencement speech, and reading the Harvard Gazette every day. He has also participated in GSD seminars in Asia, such as a waterfront study in Hong Kong and a design review in Shanghai, and praised the GSD’s efforts to connect with alumni in the region.
“I love having the chance to talk to a lot of young students and get involved in the studio projects,” Chan said. “I find it very fascinating. It’s almost like I’m going back to school again.”
Frederick Chan MAUD ’74 speaks to a crowd of alumni and friends at an event in Bangkok
As the child of artists and an artist herself, Melissa Kaish GSD ’85 grew up with painters, musicians, and writers gathering at her home for creative discussions. For her, art and design are not bound by walls; these disciplines can—and should—spill into the public sphere for the community’s benefit.
With that value in mind, Kaish and her husband, Jon Dorfman, made a generous gift to the GSD, which will support a built project on Harvard’s campus through the School’s Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) program. Kaish’s main goal: promote the GSD’s creative work beyond the walls of Gund Hall.
“It’s really about developing the life of the arts throughout the campus,” said Kaish, who attended the GSD before earning her MBA from Columbia University. “I love the idea of a merit-based award that would enable students with the absolute best ideas to have an opportunity to implement them on campus, and that the Harvard community and beyond will benefit.”
Kaish’s inspiration came from past philanthropy with the School and The Harvard Campaign, which she said allowed the GSD to broaden its impact on the community. Kaish had provided a gift for 9 Ash Street, supporting the vision of the space as a gathering place for designers. She and Dorfman became drawn to ADPD through “WE ALL,” a student design-build installation at the Grove in Boston’s North Allston neighborhood.
WE ALL, designed by Francisco Alarcon MDes ’18, Carla Ferrer Llorca MDes ’17, and Rudy Weissenberg MDes ’18, debuted in September 2017 at The Grove in Allston
“What impresses us most about the School is the breadth of degree options and international studio options,” Dorfman said, pointing to the GSD’s increased global presence. “You can study design issues around the world, and I think that makes it very, very powerful.”
“The School is now much broader,” Kaish added. “It’s reached out to the university in different ways, such as technology, sustainability, and social equity. The new joint degree with the engineering school is a bold move. It is becoming increasingly important to integrate architecture with engineering and technology.”
As Kaish supports designers of the future, she is also exploring her own creative past through the Kaish Family Art Project and an upcoming book about her late mother. The project’s mission is to promote and exhibit the work of her parents, Luise and Morton Kaish. “I’m learning a lot about the art world I didn’t know, beyond my easel,” Kaish said with a laugh.
The far-reaching impact and evolution of her parents’ art mirrors what Kaish has observed and hopes to see continue at the GSD. “For me, I think, what opportunities are we giving to students to be able to realize their visions?” she said. “The idea is that the GSD will have an impact beyond itself.”
Melissa Kaish GSD ’85 and Jon Dorfman pictured in the Kaish family studio before a collage by Luise Kaish titled “Poet in Two Worlds.”
The studio’s hypothesis is that the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in New York is to be converted into an art colony that reawakens the historic site as a living tradition in the present but one that extends and transforms many of the cultural and artistic practices of the Shakers.
Students in this studio undertake the challenge of designing a series of projects related to the subject of habitat, either as a single-family house, multifamily housing, or as community service programs (a school, a library, or an art center) in Kashgar, the ancient oasis city situated in between the great desert of Taklimakan and snow mountains of the Pamirs.
Exploring the rooted politics of architecture and its agency in everyday life students in this studio address the subject of housing in relation to the individualized society of the 21st century. The project site is located in a dense historic area of Paris and each student will be asked to design a large-scale housing project that responds to the needs of our individualized and ever-changing society.
In this studio, students will explore housing types along an urban transect, cutting from the high-density coastline and following the primary commercial corridor of Calle Ocho (Eight Street) through Little Havana and out to the Florida everglades.
This is the second studio of American Architecture. In parallel to our previous endeavors, students will work on the university campus. The course will investigate the idea of American corporate education, perhaps best embodied in the image of the Mies van der Rohe’s Armour Institute. Students will look into Mittel Amerika, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes megalopolis, where the sheer economic expansion most apparently instigated this ambiguity between the idea and its mass production.
On rethinking the scope and scale of the specific educational program, the laboratory school, students will reimagine a new type of primary public school for Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, while drawing on historic precedents including pragmatist John and Alice Chipman Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896–1903) at the University of Chicago.
The studio project is the new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum has three physical components: the ground, which acts as a memorial garden; the interior exhibition; and the architecture.
“Cross rhythm” is a term used to describe a composition made of different rhythms. This studio tries to deal with the building typology in positive way. How can we design a new house in New Orleans as a building of cross rhythm?
This studio will explore how reflective nostalgia may offer a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of China, where the erosion of cultural identity and local heritage have come as a consequence of rapid urbanization.
Reconsidering the types and spaces of institutions that are dedicated to the classification and transmission of knowledge—schools of architecture, libraries, and museums—student will imagine how they can improve not only the society at large, but also their neighborhoods, at different scales and in different ways.
How can architectural interventions help recognize, reduce, and redistribute the problems faced by domestic workers? This studio proposes to visualize and understand how space is articulated according to specific gendered, classist, and racist configurations of the social. The aim is to provide narratives of Mexico City that foreground the conflicts faced by the workforce onto which domestic labor is unloaded.
Virginia’s Eastern Shore is confronting sea level rise at a rate 40 percent faster than the global average. What can design offer in the face of this calamity? Students will examine a migratory phenomenon rooted in perpetual adaptation, one that has been in motion for far longer than the recent arc of concern for climate instability. The studio will pursue adaptive processes, land use strategies, and the design of landscapes and structures that extend the life of a challenged community.
In tiny Switzerland, landscape is regarded as a resource that serves lobbies from agriculture and speculation, to infrastructure, ecology, tourism, and recreation, each with a voice of its own except one–the landscape itself. This studio explores the potential of these spaces to develop a strong landscape voice and experience of their own, to imbue them with what Alistair Bonnet refers to as “geographical reenchantment”.
The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City. Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto.
As a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city, students will explore the operative water infrastructure in Chile.
Single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world. Precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. This studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable.
On a promontory on the left bank of the lower Rhone River, the city of Arles presides over vast plains that, until fairly recently, were characterized as wastelands destined to remain permanently uncultivated. This studio will reconsider the interactions between systems and landscapes according to different scales, limits, time, and material, advocating for territorial reconfiguration strategies that investigate the existing and the potential, in order to face dramatic ecological threats and an enduring social crisis.
The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. This studio looks at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation.
The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to examine bold new affordable housing initiatives. The site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire. Students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region.
The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In this studio, students have researched future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into “civic social districts”. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors.
The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio deals with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale.
1. Tell us about your background and early education?
I was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. I left Cincinnati in 1979 to attend college, and I spent the summer following my freshman year back in Cincinnati, but have not spent much time there since. It is, though, a remarkable place with a number of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted that overlook the Ohio River.
When I arrived at Yale for college, I had every expectation to study history. A roommate recommended that I take one of Professor Vincent Scully’s art history classes, and that year he only offered his history of modern architecture. That class, and Alexander Purves’ introduction to architecture, changed my mind, and I decided to study architecture instead.
2. What can you tell us about your early journey that got you to where you are today?
Starting at the age of ten or so I would spend Saturday mornings helping an older family friend, Walter Farmer, with his garden. Time in the garden was for work, of course, but also for conversation about topics that reached far beyond his garden fence. I gave up gardening for Little League, but he remained a mentor to me. Years later I learned that as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II, he had been the principal author of the Wiesbaden manifesto, which argued for the preservation of national art treasures. When he heard that I had elected to study architecture, he gave me a copy of Sigfried Giedon’s Space, Time and Architecture. He noted in an inscription that his copy, the first edition, had changed his life, and he hoped that it would do the same for me. After I had been accepted to the GSD, he told me that he had earned an undergraduate architecture degree and he, too, had applied to the GSD and had been accepted, but at that time could not pay the tuition – the Great Depression made it impossible for him to continue his training as an architect. His example has always been for me the proof of the good that mentors do – and the importance of financial aid.
3. What is the most significant thing you learned while at the GSD?
Classmates were, and continue to be, my most constructive and influential critics and teachers.
4. What is your favorite memory of the GSD?
Not surprisingly, it is rather difficult to choose a favorite. One that comes to mind is impromptu communal dinners where some of the junior faculty would drop by, often Wilfried Wang. Another is the privilege to have been Carol Burns’ teaching assistant. Editing an edition of the now sadly defunct Harvard Architecture Review. The quasi-metaphysical drawing instructions of Bahram Shirdel.
5. Looking back, what experiences would you recommend GSD students seek out today? What experiences at the GSD (or beyond the walls of Gund Hall) influenced your path?
Take full advantage of the spectrum that the GSD and Harvard offer. Do not limit your education just to what is offered within your degree program. Ignore the practical.
The focus of our practice has evolved to be public work. We may be best known for our reconstruction of the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, a project that lasted nearly 20 years and consisted of three phases of design and construction. During that time, we were selected for Mayor Bloomberg’s design excellence program multiple times by two New York City agencies. The opportunity led us to develop a practice that provides services almost exclusively to non-profit institutions and public agencies. One of our favorite clients is the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, for whom we have designed one of their largest buildings—the Ocean Breeze Athletic Complex—and a number of their smallest. Along the way we developed the standard for the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation restroom building. In a much smaller city, but a New York neighbor, Newark, this past summer we completed the first phase of a small but transformative park in the center of the downtown district. Taewook Cha MLA ’98, principal of Supermass Studio, was our collaborator. Currently we are working with Hargreaves Jones on a park in the center of Wilmington, North Carolina. We like these projects because of their positive effect on large, diverse, and typically underserved populations.
7. How have you approached change and growth in your career?
I have gone from drawing everything to drawing very little, which I think is the traditional arc of most careers as one takes on different responsibilities. It is also an acknowledgement that the tools of the profession have changed. Current students are exposed to software and hardware that only a few offices can afford. Experience was the great divide. It still is but cuts in different ways now.
8. We noticed (and share in) your love of pencils – personalized on your firm’s website! How did this idea come about and any idea on what will inspire the next iteration?
The idea of sending pencils as a holiday greeting came from Jennifer Sage AB ’78, the Sage of Sage and Coombe. It is a tradition that has lasted 25 years. Sending pencils as a gift is quaint and a bit silly—and that’s why we like it. We typically imprint the pencils with a phrase or other messaging that at the time seems topical. Some years the themes are ready-made—like in 2007, when we went with a James Bond theme: “Gold Pencil,” “Pencils are Forever,” and “Pencil Royale.” Some years the pencils are more like conceptual art: One of my favorite series is from 2011, when we sent out pencils labeled “Right Handed Pencil,” “Left Handed Pencil,” and “Two Handed Pencil.” Some years political statements are unavoidable. Our 2017 pencils were bright pink. We always send three. When we launched the office in 1994, there were three of us: Jennifer, Ross Wimer MArch ’88, and myself.
9. What occupies your time and thoughts when you are not working?
My wife, Betty Chen AB ’87, and I have two daughters. Both are enrolled at Yale and are remarkable young women. Miranda is studying, among other things, Arabic. Two years ago, she spent a year in Greece working with Syrian and Kurdish refugees and learned a bit of both languages as well as some Greek. Audrey, a gifted writer and chess player, just started and has some time before she must decide where to focus her energies. At the moment she is interested in film studies.
10. Where do you go to feel inspired?
I remember that Professor Jorge Silvetti’s mantra in the 1980s was that “forms come from forms,” which has certainly always been true. Visiting cities, landscapes, buildings, and in particular museums and galleries is always a source of inspiration. And I love to read—some of our less obvious strategies come from are from what we happened to have read. For example, after reading James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, we proposed cladding a building in Morse code rendered in perforated aluminum. We have also experimented with brick bonds and lighting configurations that are binary codes.
My colleagues on the Alumni Council and in the Development and Alumni Relations office, along with the members of the GSD community, are certainly sources of inspiration. The Council is comprised of a diverse group of professionals. Some members graduated in the 1960s, others are recent graduates. They represent every academic program including the Loeb Fellowship and the Advanced Management Development Program. Without fail, each is a tireless and dedicated advocate for their profession, for the alumni community, and for the School.
11. Congratulations on becoming Chair of the GSD Alumni Council this year! What areas of focus have you defined for Alumni Council members in their role as ambassadors for the GSD?
As the Alumni Council Chair, it is my sincere honor to lead the Council with Vice Chair Cathy Deino Blake, FASLA, MLA ’77 for the next three years. We will continue the work of previous generations of the Council to maintain and build robust bonds with our exceptional alumni community, the current student body, and the School administration and faculty. We begin our work with the deep belief that our alumni are an invaluable resource for the School and the University. For all of us this is a very exciting and auspicious moment of change: This past July, Sarah M. Whiting began her tenure as the Dean of the GSD; and on behalf of the Council, we welcome Sarah back to Cambridge. We eagerly look forward to supporting her goals, promoting her vision for the School, and finding the role that the alumni community will play in that vision.
The Alumni Council has three core missions: The first is to represent the alumni community, the second is to support the student body, and the third is to present the GSD to the University community and out in the world. Our mission is not only to encourage alumni to return to the GSD both literally and metaphorically, but also to bring the GSD to our alumni community, wherever that may be. This year the Council turned 65, and even with our long history we are working to increase the Council’s visibility within the School and beyond by strengthening our partnerships with GSD communications, student services, and Student Forum. In concert with the Development and Alumni Relations office, our members are embarking on a regional approach, looking within their own communities for willing partners such as emeriti members of the Council, local Harvard Clubs, or Harvard Alumni Association Shared Interest Groups.
12. How can the larger alumni community support this important work? What resources are available to them?
Before taking on the role of chair, I co-chaired the Student Alumni Exchange Committee (S/AX), first with John Shreve MAUD ’92 and more recently with Brenda Levin, FAIA, MArch ’76. Both are dedicated to the welfare of the students and look to make the GSD a more nurturing environment. Much of my outlook as Chair and what I hope we can achieve during the course of my term comes from what I learned from Brenda, John, and my time here as a student in the mid-1980s. S/AX surveyed the student body in 2017 and heard that the students are desperate for mentors. A mentorship program requires active partnership on both sides: mentors and mentees. We have found willing partners in student groups. Last spring, with the Harvard Urban Planning Organization and Womxn in Design, we helped launch two beta programs. With the support of Student Services and the Student Forum, we hope to extend mentorship efforts to other active student groups.
The alumni community can participate in this effort by developing robust profiles on the Harvard Alumni Directory. This University-wide resource allows students and fellow alumni to find those willing to serve in career networking roles and build their alumni connections. Profiles can be customized to include personal and professional-related information. This serves as a Harvard-wide verified network, sort of like a Harvard LinkedIn, where fellow alumni or students can contact you. There is more information here about how to develop a robust profile.
13. The Alumni Council serves as the representative body of the GSD alumni community. How do Alumni Council members model behavior to set an example for fellow alumnae and alumni?
Among the accomplishments of my predecessor, Allyson Mendenhall AB ’90, MLA ’99, during her term as Chair was to make equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging a priority of the Council. This past year the Council adopted a community values statement which serves as a code of ethics. We have participated in gender and sexual-based harassment prevention training and engaged in programs to understand bias, setting the standard for other alumni volunteers across the University.
We also expect that each Council member will participate fully in all of the Council’s initiatives. Our initiatives also include serving as mentors to students and young alumni, nominating others to serve on the Council, and contributing to the GSD Fund to support financial aid, along with hosting and attending events.
Each year, the Council creates opportunities for 300-400 alumni at about 15 events in cities around the world. We truly hope that all alumni will continue the mission of the Council to build community: Please participate in local events, host your own, offer to mentor a young professional or student, recommend the School to a promising student, nominate a colleague to serve on the Council, give to the annual fund, and claim your HarvardKey and create a Harvard Alumni Directory profile so that others can find you.
On that note: I’ve heard that if you are a graduate of Harvard Business School, you are free to call any other HBS graduate to ask for advice. Our goal is to make that the case for GSD alumni as well.
14. How does the Alumni Council look for new and more effective ways of building local GSD and Harvard communities within the U.S. and abroad?
As ambassadors, the task of the Council is a bit of a numbers game. There are roughly 50 of us representing a community of more than 13,000. To build vibrant communities, we have to find partners within our community who are willing to help with that work. One focus of the next few years is to identify areas and groups of alumni that have not had, or currently do not have, representation on the Council. Today’s GSD is not the GSD I knew as a student in the 1980s. Many more students are from overseas, and an increasing proportion of our alumni body is international. In the coming years, we will need to find a strategy for creating effective outreach to the areas that have not had strong alumni communities. This problem is not unique to the GSD. It is shared across the University. We recognize that what is effective in New York may not work in Dallas or in Seoul. Fortunately, in the many places that we find GSD alumni, there is often already some level of HAA infrastructure that we can leverage.
15. You serve as one of the GSD’s Appointed Directors to the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) raising the School’s profile with the HAA, sharing its mission broadly to fellow alumni leaders across the University, and demonstrating the work of GSD alumni in the world. What value do you see for GSD alumni in engaging with the broader Harvard community?
We are also very lucky to have had C. Ron Ostberg MArch ’68 as our past representative on the HAA leading the effort to elevate the relevance of graduate school alumni from across Harvard. He is a tireless advocate for the GSD within the HAA community and is always looking for ways to increase our influence. Currently a number of GSD Alumni Council emeriti serve on the HAA: Collette Creppell AB ’82, MArch ’90, Allyson Mendenhall, Jennifer Luce, FAIA, MDes ’94, Jeffrey Murphy, FAIA, MArch ’86, and Ron Ostberg. They are among the 90 GSD alumni who serve as volunteer leaders on the HAA Board or with the various Harvard Clubs and Shared Interest Groups around the world.
In many respects, the GSD has been a leader in the University community. According to President Emerita Drew Faust, GSD stands for more than Graduate School of Design; it also means “Get Stuff Done.” During his tenure as Dean, Mohsen Mostafavi was instrumental in expanding the GSD’s relevance across the University. I have no doubt that Dean Whiting will do the same.
Before I share news and updates from my fifth year as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, I would like to invite you to the upcoming GSD reception at the ASLA Annual Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego.
One of the great satisfactions for me as Chair has been to reconnect with alumni at the ASLA reception. I am always impressed by how the GSD community appears so close and connected during this event. This year we have the privilege of welcoming GSD Dean Sarah M. Whiting, Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, to our reception. Both Sarah and I look forward to seeing you on Saturday, November 16th.
It has been a busy and exciting fall at the GSD. We continue to develop climate change pedagogy, as I shared with you in my summer update. This topic permeates all aspects of the curriculum from studios to the history, technology and representation sequences. We are exploring design’s response to this greatest challenge and the many ways one can begin to conceptualize it, represent it, and develop technologies around it.
Fall option studios have taken our students around the world, showcasing how applicable the concerns of landscape architecture are, globally. Studios this year explore sites in Chile, France, Switzerland, Mexico, Virginia, and New England, and I look forward to sharing highlights with you in my next letter.
Last month, we hosted Professor Gareth Doherty’s DDes ’10 symposium and exhibition, Sacred Groves and Secret Parks: Orisha Landscapes in Brazil and West Africa. This conference explored the materiality and spatiality of Afro-religious diasporic practices. These large sacred groves, typically found in urban environments, manifest environmental understanding, memories, and cultural rituals through practices of botany, dance, and other forms of socialization.
Last week, Paola Sturla MLA ’11 delivered the annual Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow Lecture. Her research during the Fellowship explored how AI-based tools and computer simulations could support landscape architecture in the context of infrastructure planning, taking advantage of the user’s experience as a design variable. Established in 2011, this fellowship brings young practitioners and aspiring academics to teach with us for one academic year. For more information, please visit here.
I am pleased to report a new update to our lecture series. We have developed a more informal but dynamic lunchtime series where we provide an opportunity to expose students to conversational talks with visitors and visiting critics. The discussions have been rich and very well attended, and the format is woven into the fabric of everyday life at the school. This fall, it has been especially wonderful to hear Charles Eliot Traveling Fellows Alexandra Mei MLA ’17 and Michael Ezban MLA ’13 present their research.
I am also pleased to share that we have a wonderful new opportunity for our students: the GSD-Courances Residency Program. During this six-week residency, two students spend the summer at the Chateau de Courances in France, a 16th century domaine located in the Ile-de France region, 50 km south of Paris. Over the course of the residency, students learn about agricultural production, management of historical landscapes, and agroforestry, as well as develop a research program of their own. We have already had two groups of two experience this truly unique opportunity.
Looking ahead to next semester, we are delighted to announce that the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture will be delivered by Swiss landscape architect Günther Vogt, accompanied by an exhibition of his firm’s work. The lecture will be held on February 6th and the exhibit will be on view in the Druker Design Gallery until spring break. If you are nearby, I encourage you to join us for our public program of lectures and exhibitions in Gund Hall.
Finally, congratulations to my colleague Niall Kirkwood, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 2003–2009, who was recently named GSD Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. We are very proud to have someone from our department hold a major leadership position in the School.
When I began my position as dean of the GSD this July, I shared with you how thrilled I was to be joining the School in this role. That sense of adventure, coupled with responsibility, has only grown with time. Thank you for your support and engagement in my first months in this role.
When I met with students at the start of the academic year, I told them that one of the qualities that distinguishes the GSD is our remarkable density of heterogeneity. The many differences among us are one of our greatest assets, as we can learn so much from one another, but it is also important to remember that we are all so very different. As I am sure you have learned through your own varied experiences, it is crucial to take time to ask questions and listen to the views of friends, classmates, and colleagues.
I count you, our alumni, as an important piece of our collegial community. No matter your field or your GSD experience, you provide a valuable perspective into our School’s past and future. You have the unique opportunity—as someone who walked the same path as our students—to contribute to our collective conversation. We welcome your thoughts and presence here on campus and at our community events. The impact you can have on our students—whether it is a friendly networking conversation, attendance at a GSD event, or studio review—is enormous. I appreciate you devoting your time, energy, and resources to helping our designers of the future as they navigate their studies and careers.
Pursuing a graduate degree in the design disciplines can sometimes be a challenging endeavor. To empower students to thrive and contribute to the future of our disciplines, I believe in fostering an environment of empathy, respect, humor, and constructive criticism.
This last point—constructive criticism—is particularly important to me: it is so extraordinary that we enable design students to join experts like yourselves in a conversation about design. It is our obligation to teach students how to join this conversation confidently and productively. We learn as much from each other as we do from the work we produce, especially when we engage in a dialogue that puts connection and trust at the forefront. All of us are responsible for cultivating such a culture of empathy.
What I have learned in my first weeks and months as dean is that this position involves a good deal of active listening and learning; please know that I am here to listen to you. I look forward to building relationships and connecting with you in the years to come.
Over the coming year, I will be traveling to New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and I hope to meet and hear from alumni in the course of my travels.
Kind Regards,
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
As I reflect upon another year as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, I am pleased to share with you a few highlights of news, pedagogy, and programming.
At a time of heightened political discord and global awareness around the hazards of climate change, I am especially excited to recognize the GSD’s ongoing role as convener on a wide variety of practical and theoretical topics.
In early September, the department hosted a two-day interdisciplinary conference, Envisioning Future Resilience Scenarios for the Boston Harbor Islands, funded by the James M. & Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, that brought together local experts from the University of Massachusetts Boston Sustainable Solutions Lab, The Nature Conservancy, the National Park Service, Boston Harbor Now, Woods Hole Group, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, and the Stone Foundation, to share in a common conversation about building resilience for Greater Boston and to explore the role of the Harbor Islands in protecting Boston from coastal storms. The challenges raised at the conference, including sea level rise, real estate development, economy, infrastructure, recreation, quality of life, and ecology are an ongoing focus for the department and re-emerged as sites throughout the landscape core and options studios. Climate adaptation was also the topic of several studios on vastly different regions, demonstrating widespread effects. For example, Martha Schwartz GSD ’77 led a studio in North Adams, Massachusetts, hometown of MASS MoCA, which convened municipal and institutional leadership to address climate adaptation and sustainability in North Adams.
After the 2017-2018 exhibition, Landscape: Fabric of Details, in 2018-2019, we curated Mountains and the Rise of Landscape (photos above), a multi-media, seven-part exhibition that probed a panoply of questions surrounding the role of mountains in shaping our imagination, as well as their place in our collective landscape and architectural history. Pablo Pérez-Ramos MLA ’12, DDes ’18, Edward Eigen, and I assisted Michael Jakob in curating the exhibition, which included paintings, prints, film, and fiction alongside technical mapping and a sound installation of a melting glacier in the Swiss Alps by Geneva-based composers Olga Kokcharova and Gianluca Ruggeri.
We have much faculty news to share. Michael Van Valkenburgh, Charles Eliot Professor of Landscape Architecture, retired after 37 years of service. In his farewell address, the Olmsted Lecture in October, Michael gave an inspiring presentation on his long trajectory as an educator and a practitioner. We are very fortunate to have had him for so many years and wish him continuing success in the years to come.
We were delighted to welcome two new faculty: Assistant Professor Pablo Pérez-Ramos MLA ’12, DDes ’18 and Associate Professor Teresa Gali-Izard. As always, our faculty have been very productive with scholarship and publications. Of note are Sonja Duempelmann’sSeeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize; Gareth Doherty’s DDes ’10Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), which was listed one of the top ten books of 2018 by the ASLA; and Jill Desimini’s From Fallow: 100 Ideas for Abandoned Urban Landscapes (ORO Editions, 2019). (Book covers featured above in order left to right).
In April, almost 100 alumni, family, and friends gathered in Piper Auditorium for a tribute to Professor Charles “Chuck” Harris GSD ’52, who passed away in January. Chuck served on the faculty between 1958 and 1991. Carl Steinitz, Nick Dines MLA ’68, and Chuck Jr. delivered remarks, followed by a reception and small exhibit of Chuck’s papers from the Loeb Library’s archives. Curated by Professor Niall Kirkwood and Special Collections Archivist & Reference Librarian Ines Zalduendo MArch ’95, the materials documented Chuck’s long career as a faculty member at the GSD.
Our studio offerings this year reflect the energy of our times—all are politically charged, culturally relevant, multi-scalar, and full of opportunities for invention. A few studios from the fall semester stand out. Alternative Futures for Al-`Ula, Saudi Arabia, sponsored by the Royal Commission for Al-`Ula and co-taught by StephenErvin and CraigDouglas responded to a call for entries by Professor Emeritus Carl Steinitz, who organized the International Geodesign Consortium, a collaboration of approximately one hundred institutions and projects worldwide, engaged in studies of similar scope and style in fall 2018. TeresaGali-Izard taught the first in a series of studios sponsored by the LUMA Foundation. Set in the region of Arles, France, the studio explored the potential of regenerative agriculture, considering the rhizosphere—the region of soil around the roots of plants where nutrient exchange between microorganisms and plants occur—to explore the larger question of the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the role of landscape architecture in creating balance in the era of climate change. Finally, MartyPoirierMLA ’86 led a studio on Arlington National Cemetery that felt profoundly timely and emotionally laden, considering the design and entry sequence of one of our nation’s most sacred places. The studio asked students to transform the basic rudiments of arrival into a space of commemoration, considering the places that move us as a result of physical arrangements and design decisions.
In the spring, the excitement continued with studio sites that span the globe: Jungyoon Kim MLA ’00 and Yoonjin Park MLA ’00 led Landscape of Trans-Nationality: Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR) and Alternative Nature, which considered the landscape surrounding a new rail link between Russia and Korea; Aga Kahn Design Critic CatherineMosbach taught Build with Life: Transformation + Formation: Landscape and Islamic Culture; RosettaElkin continued her work on coastal climate adaptation with The Monochrome No-Image, a studio sponsored by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Sanibel Island, Florida. NiallKirkwood and GarethDoherty DDes ’10 led another politically charged studio that considered the future of Ireland after Brexit, Field Work: Brexit, Borders, and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest; and James Lord MLA ’96 and Roderick Wyllie MLA ’98 addressed drought in the southern California landscape with SUPERBLOOM: Shelter, Drought, and Sculpture in the California Desert.
To better prepare our students to consider these exciting topics at the options studio level, we have made some strategic changes to the core curriculum. The second-year core studio is now focused on climate adaptation in two parts: third semester core studio explores climate change, adaptation, and risk as fundamental to the design of the built environment, utilizing the Boston Harbor as a case study, and the fourth semester core expands students’ reach to design urban environments in surrounding coastal communities.
The past two years have been marked by my intense engagement with university-wide committees. As I mentioned to those of you at October’s alumni reception in Philadelphia around ASLA (photos above), I was honored to serve on the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, and on the University’s presidential search advisory committee. As a planner, PresidentLawrenceS. Bacow is a friend of the School, and we anticipate he will champion design in the broader university community. I also served on the GSD dean search advisory committee, and I am most excited to welcome our new Dean Sarah M. Whiting, who began on July 1. I thank outgoing Dean Mohsen Mostafavi for his support of our department during his 11 years as leader of the school. During his tenure, our department grew its student body and faculty ranks, as well as our presence in the culture of the school and university at large.
I would like to encourage you to join us on campus for a lecture or any of our public events this fall. Also, mark your calendars for the ASLA Annual Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego on November 15-18; I hope to see you at the GSD Reception during the Conference.
Please stay in touch; I sincerely look forward to connecting with you.
Warm Regards,
Anita Berrizbeitia, FAAR, MLA ’87
Professor of Landscape Architecture
Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture
It’s a privilege to write to fellow architecture alumni as Chair of the Department of Architecture. It’s been a year of enormous transitions for me, moving from sunny Los Angeles to the more variable climate of Cambridge, opening a satellite office here, and embarking on a new leadership role at the Graduate School of Design. I continue to be amazed and inspired by the vitality of our faculty, our students, and our robust alumni community. The GSD seems to dominate in our fields. Last year’s 65th annual Progressive Architecture Awards recognized 10 projects: three were by GSD faculty, and two were by GSD alumni. The thing that delighted me the most this past fall was the diversity of voices at the School. For the first time in the GSD’s history, the majority of architecture option studios were taught by female faculty or visitors. These studios covered a broad spectrum of topics and locales reflecting the full breadth of today’s practice: Annabelle Selldorf taught a studio that reconsidered future frameworks for urban environments set innocuously in Framingham, MA in 2048; Tatiana Bilbao, with Iwan Baan, led a housing studio set in Mexico City that explored how the photographic image influences design; Sofia von Ellrichshausen, with Mauricio Pezo, orchestrated a studio on nature, speculating on the apparent contradiction between intentionality and chance; Caroline O’Donnell helped students explore the potential to re-use of the plethora of local materials known as “waste;” Anna Heringer investigated a day care prototype for Rohingya children with her students; and Alison Brooks explored the latent potential of housing architecture in London. And that’s just the studios taught by women (pictured above from left to right in order of mention).
Our faculty are regularly recognized for their unprecedented contributions. Longtime architecture faculty member Toshiko Mori—who was the first female faculty to receive tenure at the GSD, and was chair of the department from 2002 to 2008—has been named the 2019 recipient of the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallionfor Excellence in Architectural Education. The Topaz, which has been awarded annually since 1976, is the highest honor given to an educator in architecture. This year’s award is especially poignant, as it is the first time in the Topaz’s history that the award has been given in two consecutive years to faculty from the same school— our esteemed Jorge Silvetti was the 2018 Topaz recipient. In fact, the list of Topaz recipients is riddled with former faculty and alumni: Toshiko Mori, Jorge Silvetti, Michael Graves MArch ’59, Adele Naude Santos MAUD ’63, Lance Jay Brown BArch ’65, MAUD ’66, Jerzy Soltan, Donlyn Lyndon, Denise Scott-Brown, Henry N. Cobb March ’49, Kenneth B. Frampton LF ’73, John Hejduk MArch ’53, Robert Geddes MArch ’50, Charles E. Burchard MArch ’40, Marcel Breuer, and G. Holmes Perkins MArch ’29—reinforcing the reach and impact of a GSD education. This year also welcomed new opportunities for our students. The Rome Travel Fund named its inaugural fellow in 2018. A traveling fellowship established to honor Rafael Moneo with generous support from Seng Kuan AB ’98, MUP ’04, PhD ’11 and Angela Y. Pang MArch ’02, the Rome Travel Fund will support three months of summer travel to Rome, Italy for the awarded Master of Architecture student in his/her second year of study. This summer, the first two fellowship recipients, Kaoru Lovett (2018 recipient) MArch ’20 and Anna Kaertner (2019 recipient) MArch ’21 will travel to Rome; I wish Kaoru and Anna an adventuresome summer.
We launched two exciting new lunchtime lecture series this year aimed at expanding the conversation on design: Five on Five and Books and Looks pair emerging talents with more established practitioners in the hope of better representing the full arc of one’s professional career and promoting intergenerational dialogue. Five on Five talks this semester, which ask two participants to present five projects each (either their own work or work that inspires them), include some sensational pairings: Andrew Holder / Preston Scott Cohen MArch ’85 (March 27), Iñaki Abalos / Michael Meredith MArch ’00 (March 29), and Jennifer Bonner MArch ’09 / Jeanne Gang MArch ’93 (April 11). Upcoming Books and Looks offerings, which pair authors and scholars to reflect upon the impact and context of a journal or publication, include: Reto Geiser, Giedion and America author, with Edward Eigen (April 22), and a special evening talk featuring Jonathan Massey and Barry Bergdoll to discuss their book, Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions, with Erika Naginski (April 23). The department also welcomes TEd’A arquitectes, a tiny award-wining practice based in Mallorca, Spain, to present in the evening lecture series on April 8th. Please join us for any of these talks, if you are in the area.
Our curriculum also supports a diversity of opinions, with pioneering studios being led by new faculty: a study in invigorating and recycling Brutalist architecture with contemporary tools led by Jeanne Gang MArch ’93; an exploration of ephemerality and adaptability through the design of a tall building in Miami, FL led by my partner Sharon Johnston MArch ’95; and a revitalized approach to the second semester core studio led by Michelle Chang MArch ’09. Additionally, a studio charged with re-thinking the humanist skyscraper in Chicago is led by renowned architect and planner Moshe Safdie.
The move east has brought many happy surprises. I have especially enjoyed the opportunity to become reacquainted with a handful of local practices run by GSD alumni, whose work serves as a great reminder of the power of good design: the MASS Design Group established by alumni Michael Murphy MArch ’11 and Alan Ricks MArch ’10, is an innovative, non-profit design practice serving the social sector; and Payette, an established, full-service architecture firm, was awarded the 2019 AIA Architecture Firm Award in recognition of their longstanding commitment to design excellence under the leadership of President Kevin Sullivan MArch ’94. Our alumni are evidence of our success.
While I am certain that your practice is as busy and full as our calendar, we would be honored to see you on campus for a lecture.
Please be in touch.
Warm regards,
Mark Lee MArch ’95 Professor in Practice of Architecture Chair of the Department of Architecture
I hope this note finds you all well! I am reaching out to highlight some of the changes that started last spring and some new activities this year.
Last spring we inaugurated a new DDes networking event, DDes Alumni Encounters. In April 2018, we hosted Carlos Cardenas DDes ’07 and GSD Alumni Council member Zenovia Toloudi DDes ’11 for an evening dinner and discussion. Students who attended were able to talk about their work, network, share experiences regarding doctoral studies and careers, and make valuable connections.
Also last spring we launched the first round of DDes Research Grants, thanks to generous donations from DDes alumni and matching funds from the Dean’s office. In a highly competitive application process, over $15,000 of grants were awarded to outstanding DDes candidates who were able to focus their time on research, fieldwork, or writing.
With this year’s incoming class of DDes students, we will incorporate some changes to the required DDes curriculum. In the 2018-2019 academic year, we will reverse the order of independent study and proseminar. During the fall students can use the semester to get acclimated to the GSD, get to know their advisor, and review the literature related to their topic. The pro-seminar, now called ‘Discourses and Methods’ is then offered in the spring as the framework for crafting the prospectus. I enjoy teaching it this current spring semester.
With this year’s incoming class of DDes students, we will incorporate some changes to therequired DDes curriculum. In the 2018-2019 academic year, we will reverse the order of independent study and proseminar. During the fall students can use the semester to get acclimated to the GSD, get to know their advisor, and review the literature related to their topic. The pro-seminar, now called ‘Discourses and Methods’ is then offered in the spring as the framework for crafting the prospectus. I enjoy teaching it this current spring semester.
In September, three second-year DDes students-Boya Guo DDes ’20, MDes ’17; Mojdeh Mahdavi DDes ’20; and Liang Wang DDes ’20, MAUD ’17-organized the annual DDes conference, “[RE]FORM: New Investigations in Urban Form.” The conference aimed to provoke new investigations and debates on urban form and its relevance in contemporary urbanization by putting together three panels of distinguished scholars from around the globe. If you were unable to make to campus for the conference, photos are below and please see the links that follow for videos of the sessions.
Panel 1: Reconstructing the Agency of Form
Panelists: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Neyran Turan DDes ’09; Moderator: Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture & Director of the Office for Urbanization
Panel 3: Future Transformation of Urban Form
Panelists: Kees Christiaanse, Sarah Williams; Moderator: Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism & Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
The 2018 Commencement saw nine DDes graduates join your ranks of “the ancient and universal company of scholars.” You can view their bios at this link.
Ali Fard, Class Marshal, “Grounding the Cloud.” Advised by Neil Brenner
Nicole Beattie “Understanding Design Responsibility in Human Health: A Case-Study Approach For Evaluating Sunlight Use in Chilean Public Housing and Its Lack of Design Variability.” Advised by Martin Bechthold DDes ’01
Wendy Fok “Whose Digital Property.” Advised by Antoine Picon
Saira Hashmi “Cultural Design Approach to Conserving Water: A Case Study on the Azraq Oasis.” Advised by Hashim Sarkis
Aleksandra Jaeschke “Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes.” Advised by Iñaki Abalos
Ghazal Jafari “Grounding UPS: An Infrastructural Ethnography of a Logistics Corporation.” Advised by Pierre Belanger
Pablo Pérez-Ramos “Forms of Ecology: Towards New Epistemological Binds between Landscape Architecture and Ecology.” Advised by Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87
Bing Wang “Decision-Making Support in Early Design Stage for High Performance Naturally Ventilated Buildings.” Advised by Ali Malkawi
Arta Yazdanseta “Designing Green Walls: An Early-design Tool to Estimate the Cooling Impact of Indirect Green Walls on Buildings in Six Different Climates.” Advised by Ali Malkawi
Suleiman Alhadidi,MArch, University of Melbourne; BS, University of Jordan
Aleksandar Bauranov,MS, University of California; BS, University of Belgrade
Yonghui Chen MDes ’18, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; M.Eng., Tianjin University; B.Eng., Tianjin University
Sang-Yong ChoMLA ’14, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; MFA, New York Academy of Art; BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Ellie Han MDes ’18,MDes, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; MS, Carnegie Mellon University; BArch, Korean National University
Esesua Ikpefan MDes ’18,MDes, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; BFA, Syracuse University
Elitza Koeva, MS, University of Tokyo; MA, Tokyo University; BS, University of National and World Economy
Ashley Tannebaum,MArch, Clemson University; BA, Clemson University
Daniel Tish,MArch, University of Michigan; BS, Washington University
As alumni of the program, you have seen how the DDes program is essential to understanding critical issues facing the built environment, enhancing transdisciplinary knowledge, and complementing research through a cohort of talented scholars who propel transformative design agendas forward. To ensure that our ambitious doctoral students have the opportunity to study in your footsteps, we hope you will share in our commitment to these extraordinary individuals.
With your support of the DDes program, we can attract the attention of top candidates and support these design scholars on their path to influencing and shaping knowledge of their fields of study.
Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology
Wyss Institute Associate Faculty
Director, Material Processes and Systems Group
Director, Doctor of Design Program
Co-Director, Master in Design Engineering Program
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
It’s been my great pleasure to connect with so many of you at various GSD alumni gatherings and planning events over the course of the last few years. I am grateful for the support and vitality of our robust alumni community; the GSD is a better place because of your engagement.
Despite our global reach, the department continues to focus efforts on the needs of our immediate community by bringing GSD planning and design talents to bear on urban challenges in Cambridge, Allston, and the Greater Boston area. This fall we welcomed back GSD alumnus and former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan MArch ’95, MPA ’95, to teach an option studio on the transformation of Allston, home to Harvard’s expanding campus. This important studio foreshadowed the announcement of an innovative new community design and learning initiative, tentatively titled GSD Bridges, that aspires to cement the GSD’s relationship with local non-profits, community groups, civic organizations, and government agencies. We are grateful for the support and commitment of Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, who shares our vision for this worthy program. Educating design leaders necessitates collaboration between urban planning and urban design, between our department and other GSD departments, among the schools within the University, and ultimately with an informed community. We hope that GSD Bridges reinforces our commitment to engaging our neighbors to create impact locally.
Our department continues to provide leadership within the broader discipline. I am delighted to acknowledge the recent successes of our faculty. Our esteemed colleague,Ann Forsyth, will succeed Alan A. Altshuler as the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Design. Professor Forsyth was also awarded the American Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Margarita McCoy Award for her outstanding contributions to the advancement of women in planning and named Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association. David GambleMAUD’97 and Alex Krieger MCPUD ’77 convened a roundtable on the Future of Urban Design at a symposium in Washington DC hosted by the AIA and its Regional Urban Design Committee. And several of us, including Eve Blau, Joan Busquets, Andres Sevtsuk, Rahul Mehrotra MAUD ’87, and I, have published books (covers below left to right) this year that we hope will make significant contributions to our respective fields. Please emailmy office to get more information on recent publications.
Our students have garnered similar acclaim. Incoming and existing students have also been recognized with significant scholarships: Henna Mahmood MUP ’20 received the 2018 Judith McManus Price Scholarship for women and minorities entering the field of planning, Gina Ciancone MUP ’19, MArch ’21 won the 2018 Charles Abrams Scholarship for students intending to study planning, and Mark Bennett MUP ’19 won the Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Our options studios have also continued to engage timely themes, including gender and public space, in a studio in Argentina taught by UPD alumna Chelina Odbert MUP ’07, founder of the award-winning design firm KDI; an examination of sanitation infrastructure in Mumbai, undertaken in a sixth studio Extreme Urbanism studio led by Rahul Mehrotra MAUD ’87; and the future of streets in a world where disruptive transportation technologies upend longstanding assumptions about streetscapes, through a Los Angeles-based studio led by Andres Sevtsuk that considers the impact of new mobility technologies on the built environment. Finally, a new course offered this spring on socially impactful real estate development, co-taught by UPD alumna and former head of the Boston Planning and Development Agency Sara Myerson MUP ’11, further reinforces our commitment to collaborating locally.
While I am certain that your practice is as busy and full as our calendar, I would be honored to see you on campus for a lecture.
I look forward to connecting soon.
Warm Regards,
Diane Davis Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
It’s a privilege to write to Master of Design Studies (MDes) alumni as Program Director. These are exciting times to be leading the program—this has been a year of productive change for the advanced studies program, which has evolved and grown considerably over its 30-year history. With 170 students enrolled, 76 of those starting this year, MDes has reached a new high in terms of both enrollment and influence. To ensure our relevance, bolster the program’s quality, and meet the needs of our diverse student population, we have made several significant improvements this year.
First, we restructured the degree to offer two paths: a 3 or 4-semester coursework degree, and a 4-semester coursework plus thesis program. In this first year operating under the new model, we have far fewer thesis candidates than previous years: 38 this year versus 80 last year. While many students elected this direction over the thesis path, the students who have elected to complete a thesis are better supported with expanded access to faculty and resources. Second, and perhaps even more impactful, we debuted a new MDes thesis workspace in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum that is located at 485 Broadway, just across the street from Gund Hall. For the first time ever, MDes thesis students are enjoying desk space, lockable storage, a dedicated shop & projection equipment, as well as a small lounge. Eventually, I hope to offer space to the entire program.
Finally, ongoing refinements to our eight areas of concentration ensure that the program reflects the world around us and leverages the expertise of our faculty. We are continuing to work on and revise our areas to reflect emerging realities and anticipate further changes in the near future to respond to the growing demand of these areas which may benefit from further subdivision.
With these internal refinements in place, we are eagerly looking outward to create external initiatives that support student research. By partnering with firms and industry, we hope to create fieldwork opportunities for students that allow them to further their research through funded, topic-specific workshops, internships, or trips. Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on this front.
While all concentrations are thriving, Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) had an especially robust fall. In an effort to respond to a growing interest in “making,” MDes launched a new seminar course for 2nd year ADPD students. “MAKE/BELIEVE,” co-taught by Dan Borelli MDes ’12 and Rebecca Uchill, is a hybrid production-theory course that emphasizes project-based inquiries focused on the intersections of materiality, expression, and public engagement. ADPD also welcomed Malkit Shoshan, founder and director of FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory and lecturer in Urban Planning and Design, to join Krzysztof Wodiczko as ADPD Area Head.
We are delighted that the student-formed Design Research Forum (DRF) organized a spring symposium entitled Latitude: A Forum on Design Researchon April 13, 2019. The one-day event comprised three panels of invited speakers, GSD faculty, and MDes students, each investigating distinct spheres of design research: “Humanities and the Social Sciences;” “Methodologies of Science and Technology;” and “Design Research in/as Practice.” DRF was conceived and founded as a compliment to the MDes program by students seeking a venue to test and workshop ideas, methodologies, analyses, and works in progress.
MDes also hosted three major lectures this year that provided new perspectives on design, reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of the School’s core disciplines. At November’s Open House, we welcomed the internationally renowned graphic designer Irma Boom. A regular collaborator with Rem Koolhaas, Boom pronounced her obsession with books and defended their significance in the digital age. Also in November, we hosted the ever-provocative Jan Boelen for the Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts to speak on the topic of “Design as Learning,” encouraging students to consider everyday objects in a novel manner. In March, we welcomed distinguished humanities scholar Rosi Braidotti from the Netherlands to deliver “Posthuman Knowledge,” in conjunction with Women in Design. We are delighted to have had such notable provocateurs as part of our lecture series (speakers pictured above left to right in order of mention).
While I am certain that your practice is as busy and full as our calendar, we would be honored to have you visit campus for a lecture, or join us at one of the great upcoming alumni events! Stay in touch.
Warm Regards,
John May MArch ’02 Director of the Master in Design Studies Program Assistant Professor of Architecture
To help save her hometown of Bangkok, Thailand from rising sea levels and climate change, Kotchakorn Voraakhom MLA ’06 founded the landscape architecture design firm Landprocess and a social enterprise called Porous City Network, a landscape architecture social enterprise working to increase urban resilience. Through Porous City Network, Voraakhom works with communities throughout Southeast Asia to help find other ways to bring back green space and live with water. In response to the threat of flooding, Voraakhom has created an 11-acre Centenary Park at Chulalongkorn University that contains artificial wetlands and underground containers that can hold one million gallons of water. While at the GSD, she co-founded the Konkuey Design Initiative, an international partnership that works with communities in difficult landscapes to design and rebuild public space through a participatory process.
Voraakhom is a TED Fellow (watch her TED Talk here), Echoing Green Fellow, Atlantic Fellow, and Asia Foundation Development Fellow and was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People for 2019.” Also, she is also a highly active campaigner for public green space and is a design consultant for the Redevelopment Bangkok 250 project celebrating the city’s 250th anniversary. This November 2019, she will be a featured speaker at the ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture’s session “No Time to Waste: Landscape Architecture and the Global Challenge of Climate Change,” along with fellow alumnus Kongjian Yu DDes ’95. Find more information here.
1. Tell us about your background.
Bangkok is where home is to me—it rooted in me are its tropical landscape, monsoon rain, humid air, canals, and rivers. I was born here, back when the city was nothing more than low density with rice fields. My parents were the first Chinese generation in Thailand, after migrating from the mainland during the country’s cultural revolution. Hardworking and business-oriented, they were also invested in my and my siblings’ education.
During my undergrad at Chulalongkorn University—the country’s oldest university or as many call it, the “Harvard of Thailand”—I first learned about landscape architecture. The profession was new and still not well-recognized in Thailand then. And at the age of 18, I didn’t know what it was exactly either. But years past and the more I realized what I was getting myself into. Today, I feel very grateful for having chosen this path to pursue in landscape architecture.
2. Why did you decide to come to Harvard for your MLA?
During my senior undergrad year in Thailand, I applied for internships in some of the top design firms in the US. Luckily, I became the first student from my department to intern in the US at Sasaki’s SWA Summer Internship program and then Design Workshop in the following year.
Voraakhom working in the trays as a GSD student.
From Stuart O. Dawson MLA ’58 and Alistair MacIntosh (Sasaki) to William Byrd Callaway MLA ’71 (SWA) and Todd Johnson MLA ’82 (Design Workshop), I was fortunate enough to learn and work with several legacy makers in the field. During my internships in the US, I got the chance to collaborate with several GSD teachers and alumni, all who were people to whom I looked up and aspired to emulate.
3. Looking back, what experiences at the GSD were the most helpful in shaping your career?
There are those classes that would blow my mind about landscapes, especially from the classical lecture classes with Carl Steinitz (Landscape Planning), Richard Forman (Landscape Ecology), Niall Kirkwood (Brownfield), and John StilgoePhD ’77. Those classes shifted my entire worldview and remain relevant to this day.
I was a recipient of the Penny White Project Fund, which I used to study the aftermath of the Tsunami disaster in Thailand in 2004, those lectures began to make sense. During this research trip, I remember the voices of my professors sounding like a small symphony in my head! Their courses really helped me set up a foundation of understanding in the essence of landscape architecture and the potential it holds.
4. What about the GSD currently excites you?
As my work primarily concerns changing landscapes amidst our current climate crisis, I am always excited to see GSD’s option studios discuss the issue, especially with a focus across a variety of geographical regions around the world. I think by doing so, the GSD is taking the academic lead in the built environment and pushing new generations of designers to set the mission as their top design priority.
Award-winning students, professors, and alumni—like Assistant Professor of Architecture Holly Samuelson MDes ’09, DDes ’13 who has been awarded the Climate Change Solutions Fund grant by now Harvard President Emerita Drew Faust and many option studios focusing in this topic—put a big smile on my face and give me hope by creating a new standard of climate resilience design in academic and profession.
5. You have worked with Design Workshop and GSD Alumni Council Chair Emerita Allyson Mendenhall AB ’90, MLA ’99. How did this relationship come about?
I feel extremely honored to have had Allyson has my mentor, colleague, and friend, during my time at Design Workshop. She’s very organized as a project manager, and I learned a lot being part of her team. Moreover, I learned from her devotion to ambition, especially about the demanding nature of being a woman in the profession. Back then, she had just had her second baby, and she handled it beautifully.
With her expertise in writing from her English major at Harvard, she helped edit my GSD application essay and portfolio text, all with red lines and clear explanations for my Thai-sounding English. To this day, I still feel extremely grateful for her kindness.
Dean Emeritus Mohsen Mostafavi with Kotchakorn Voraakhom MLA ’06 at the March 2019 GSD Alumni Reception in Bangkok.
6. You attended the GSD Bangkok Alumni Reception in March. What was this experience like? What value do you see in engaging with the GSD alumni community and connecting with the School?
The Reception was a great bonding time for me and my GSD friends! It was lovely for us Thai GSD alumni to physically reconnect—the most Thai alumni gathering I’ve ever experienced in Bangkok. Seeing Dean Emeritus Mohsen Mostafavi and GSD’s commitment to enriching the relationship with alumni in Thailand, I’m excited to see the future collaborations that will come out from our get-together. The reception reminded me of that need for belonging, and GSD and its people will always have a place for me.
7. When Thailand flooded in 2011, you were displaced from your home along with millions of other people. How did this influence your work?
I would have never thought my childhood pastime, boat paddling with friends in the floodwaters in front of my house as a little girl, would later become a catastrophic disaster. It was an awakening period for me to be displaced in my own homeland, along with millions of my people.
Bangkok is one of the most threatened cities by climate change, and the concrete urban infrastructure we have has made us very vulnerable to future uncertainties. With no excuse, as practitioners of the physical built environment, we, too, are part of the problem in our work and impact in urban development. But as a landscape architect, I know I can be part of the answer for urban flooding and other environmental issues, and so I work every day to execute those solutions and enable people in professions different and alike to do the same.
8. Tell us about your professional career. You founded the landscape design studio Landprocess and the social enterprise Porous City Network. What drives your work?
Practicing with public space takes a particular intersection of designer instincts and entrepreneurship to work creatively and push through projects that truly benefit society. Most design firms in Thailand survive by working with commercial projects like condominiums or malls, but I want to create an innovative player in today’s challenging business climate. Landprocess commits to provide service in public projects and difficult urban landscape contexts, and while it hasn’t been easy, this is my passion and ‘easy’ isn’t what I’m looking for!
Landprocess has been operating for seven years, while Porous City Network (PCN) is entering its third. With the experience of founding and co-founding several organizations, I’ve learned how to establish and grow socially-impactful ventures, as well as attracting funding sources to not only sustain but elevate them. Both organizations are currently active with their original missions intact at the core of every project.
PCN addresses one broad but critical question: how can we make a city porous? Decades of rapid urbanization worldwide has created vulnerabilities and increased water stresses in our urban landscapes. Urban sprawls destroy cities’ natural eco-services, their resilience, and their ability to adapt. In Thailand, agricultural land and ecological green patches that once absorbed seasonal flood and cycles of monsoon rain have been paved over by urban development, degrading urban ecology and increasing flooding and stormwater pollution. PCN works to revive traditional knowledge about our ecology and reintegrate that back into our approach in sustainable urban development.
In addition to producing landscape solutions to mitigate urban flooding, PCN’s mission also revolves around education advocacy and participatory processes in co-creating those innovations. As a landscape architect, I believe we are obligated not only to contribute but also spread these solutions across a diverse range of regions and professions.
9. You’ve spoken about your work at many conferences including TED Conference in Vancouver (2018), and a United Nations Panel on social enterprises (2018). and keynote opening for United Climate Change, NAP Expo 2019. On Monday, November 18, you will be speaking at the American Society of Landscape Architects Conference on Landscape Architecture on the panel “No Time to Waste: Landscape Architecture and the Global Challenge of Climate Change.” The panel also includes fellow GSD alumnus Kongjian Yu DDes ’95. How did this panel come about? What are you looking forward to most about ASLA?
Firstly, I would like to thank ASLA for inviting me to the special occasion. I’d like to believe my role at the conference is in providing context about the difficult landscape I come from, about the challenges I face as a landscape architect in solving environmental issues in my city and region. While climate change is a global problem, its impacts are very site-specific—so are its solutions, which need to be implemented under cautious consideration to the location’s ecology, topography, culture, and budget. First-world solutions shouldn’t be copy-pasted to developing countries without a deep understanding of the places’ social and environmental complexity. And because of that, I am honored to be able to share my insights from the landscape architecture profession which has plenty to offer to solve the crisis.
This year’s ASLA will be my first, and I am looking to reconnect with my colleagues and friends and share what we have developed in our careers. Kongjian Yu DDes ’95 and Hitesh Mehta are both big-name landscape architects who I respect as my role model coming from a generation of practitioners before me. For this climate change discussion, I’d like to share my situation with them and discuss how we can work in our field to confront climate emergency together.
10. What advice do you have for GSD students and/or alumni?
My time at GSD was a period of my life when I explored and searched for new territory in who I was as a landscape architect. Even more so, it was the time I found my people. Some might say it’s a competitive place, cold and grey, but for me, it was a warm and welcoming place where I made friends for life.
These weren’t just the friends for Beer ‘n Dogs—they were the ones you find along your journey when you needed someone to reflect upon yourself with or see a different perspective whether in work or life. So I’d suggest you look all around—they may not look like one, but everyone around you is critical, funny, passionate, and hardworking in their own ways—just like you! Learn not only from the class and professors, but also your friends and classmates.
11. Where do you go to feel inspired and fulfilled?
I go to landscapes and its people and let their interconnected relationships fascinate me. I love to see beautiful humanmade landscape architecture, but what stuns me more is seeing the meaningful interplay they have with their surrounding landscapes and lifeforms.
While this line of work can be challenging and bittersweet, to see my projects interwoven with my passion and purpose is exciting, fulfilling, and all worth it. Although it’s important to work to address the needs of your clients, I think what’s more necessary is working for the place and its people.
12. What is the difference in practice between the US and Thailand?
I learned a lot being a practitioner in the US, with that experience permanently firmly embedded in the foundation of my life-long career.
One time, I was tasked with designing a casino in Las Vegas, and while that may sound like a dream project to many, it made me question my role as a landscape architect. What and who was the landscape for? Working on a project that provided no positive deep impact or purpose, it is meaningless. I realized I valued public use projects much more, contributing with purpose to a place in need and people at risk. I felt the need to create a landscape that made sense not only to me but the landscape and people that lived upon it.
With that realization, I decided to return home to continue another chapter of my life. It definitely has not been the easier path, but regardless, I feel more alive and fulfilled to now serve the land I come from and its people in need.
13. What would surprise us about you?
Surprise #1: We—my Thai GSD alumni friends, Professor Niall Kirkwood, and I—are planning on launching the first option studio in Bangkok, where I will teach and organize courses in collaboration with GSD and universities in Thailand. If it’s possible and when it’s official, I’d love to invite GSD students to sign up for it. Bangkok is a rapidly growing city on a delta landscape, and we are one of the most at-risk cities of climate change with good food, so we need all your help!
Surprise #2: I’m excited for my green roof at Thammasat University to be completed very soon! It will be the biggest one yet in any single building in Southeast Asia, equipped with landscape solutions to tackle climate change using urban farming and rain and runoff utilization as the architecture’s skin. I look forward to sharing more about this project with you by the end of this year.
The green roof at Thammasat University.
14. Please let us know about anything not addressed here that you’d like to share with readers.
You know those exhausting days and nights when you put more than 100% into your project, just to present it to a big-name guest lecturer in one of your courses? They were extremely tiring, but you know that big smile you get hearing the “great work!” coming from those lecturers? It definitely paid off at your desk crit and pin-up, and I’m sure it will, too, later in your future work. Weren’t they more than 100% worth it?
I hope the profession we share flourishes in helping the world deal with the pressing issue of climate change, and we can all contribute by putting it as our top priority in design and its implementation. Here are some links to my work that I’d love to share with you all. We journey together to a goal to make our planet Earth better each day, and I hope we can get there as soon as possible with our conjoined efforts.
With industry leaders—including Boeing and Clark Construction—and world-class academic researchers joining forces, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s (GSD) Laboratory for Design Technologies is undertaking its first project: “The Future of Air Travel.”
The Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT) acts as a shared platform for the GSD’s design technology research units and faculty, whose specialties include responsive technologies and sensing, adaptive and smart material systems, robotics and 3D printing, computational design and modeling, urban analytics, and geographic information systems. The GSD is inviting leading companies to join The LDT Industry Advisors Group, which links business and government stakeholders with academic researchers to shape the future of the built environment.
Martin Bechthold DDes ’01
“Today’s world is incredibly interconnected. We need to broaden the focus of designers, we need to understand the deeper societal, economic and ecological challenges when conceiving the future built environment,” said Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology Martin Bechthold DDes ’01, who heads the Laboratory’s Materials Processes + Systems unit. “LDT is a collaborative platform that integrates academic and industrial vantage points with the goal of developing ideas and prototypes for a better world.”
The Industry Advisors have the opportunity to guide and access broad-based, strategic research, exploring fundamental questions, and new paths at the GSD. With small, autonomous air mobility options appearing on the horizon, the GSD sees opportunities for its design researchers to join with industry to offer technical and policy solutions. Aerospace companies are prototyping passenger air vehicles; at the same time, air drones promise to change shipping infrastructure. The growing need for a more integrated approach regarding flight and urban environments dovetailed with the mission of the LDT, which is to advance understanding of how design technologies can improve the human condition. Industry Advisors on “The Future of Air Travel” include Boeing, Clark Construction, gmp, Hickok Cole, Massport, and Perkins&Will.
“The research in this project will explore how best to approach safety, timeliness, fuel consumption, and profitability alongside metrics of human experience, such as comfort, anxiety, or confusion,” said Associate Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology Allen Sayegh MDes ’96, who leads the LDT Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab. “Analyzing these components will allow us to advance design that addresses the fine line between human experience and issues of logistics, safety, and economics.”
“How can we shape the future of flight, while addressing the dilemma of sustainability and the enormous growth prediction of air travel?” Bechthold added. “Air travel has become a key factor in today’s connected world, yet congestion and delays are plaguing passengers globally. Combining the GSD’s strength in design research and computational simulation, we hope to help promote the next generation of aerospace technology by investigating both the human experience as well as the regional mobility interactions on the ground and in the air.”
Researchers and industry experts will undertake two focus areas related to “the Future of Air Travel.” First, they will explore the relationship between air infrastructure and its city and regional hosts, with the goal of creating software that can model the impacts of future aerial technologies on existing and future air travel hubs, as well as the cities and regions around them. The project will build an encyclopedia of aerial mobility that compiles the current “rules” and constraints around aerial planning, including details about vehicle and communication technologies, infrastructure, and policies and regulations. It will also produce design software for future scenarios, which will contribute to multidimensional computer modeling and help estimate impacts on air planning.
The second project will examine the human experience in air travel, including how people navigate airports and planes. Researchers will work to measure airport ambiance, predict behavior in particular environments, and use this knowledge to enable improved design of spaces throughout the entire experience of air travel.
The ultimate goal of this project is to find new methods to quantify experiences and give new toolkits to designers and decision makers in order to create better spaces ~ Allen Sayegh
“The ultimate goal of this project is to find new methods to quantify experiences and give new toolkits to designers and decision makers in order to create better spaces,” said Allen Sayegh.
For Boeing, joining this research initiative was a natural fit. In 2018, the aviation pioneer formed Boeing NeXt, which is an organization leading the safe and responsible introduction of future air vehicles and the new mobility ecosystem that will enable operations in urban, regional, and global markets. Leaders say increasing urbanization, a growing global population, aging infrastructure and the explosion of e-commerce calls for new, sustainable, and accessible modes of transportation. Expanding airspace access for autonomous vehicles has both regulatory and technical challenges, and Boeing sees opportunities for solutions in this partnership with the GSD.
“These societal and technological trends are tangible and measurable, and they are converging to define a new vision for the future of mobility,” said Egan Greenstein, Boeing NeXt senior director. “We are excited for this collaboration that will help bring this vision into focus.”
As a builder for both airports and airlines, Clark Construction Group is excited to support the development of design technologies that will enhance the air travel experience. Clark sees “the Future of Air Travel” project as a way to elevate airport and air travel design practices, which lead to innovations in airport construction. Clark’s decision to partner with the GSD supports the company’s continuing commitment to enhance its aviation center of excellence. The center of excellence connects Clark’s aviation construction professionals across the country to share best practices and lessons learned, with the ultimate goal of better serving their aviation clients.
Clark’s vice chairman, William R. Calhoun, Jr., said this about Clark’s involvement in the GSD program: “Clark is excited to collaborate with the GSD and forward-thinking industry leaders to help develop the most advanced thinking and design technologies in holistic, value-based asset creation solutions. The partnership will enable us to explore the benefits of thinking beyond first cost criteria by encouraging an active dialog that considers life cycle cost, future facility flexibility, alternative economic modeling, increased sustainability and resiliency, and integration of facilities with their communities and local infrastructure. We look forward to bringing the benefits of this visionary program to our aviation clients and partners.”
The future of air travel isn’t a concept that one discipline or one sector can solve alone, which is why the GSD aims to unify industry leaders as they reimagine air travel at both the human and system scale. The LDT’s framework enables creative partnerships that can look to the skies, providing better chances of finding solutions to the complex challenges of air travel and beyond.
Statistical analysis and love don’t usually go together, but Kay O’Neil MCRP ’78 and David Nelson MCRP ’78 have found success with this unique pairing.
The couple, who met at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), have been together for 42 years. They are thankful to the GSD both for the foundational skills it provided in city and regional planning and for bringing them together. To formalize that gratitude, Kay and David have provided a generous gift to the school through their life insurance policy.
“Harvard has always been training talented people in a way that will allow them to make changes and contribute to society in remarkable ways,” David said. “We were very happy at the GSD, and we’ve been very happy together for the last 42 years. It was a wonderful experience, and we want others to have it.”
Kay and David’s journeys toward their GSD experience date back to their childhoods. Kay grew up in Northwoods, the first planned unit development in the state of Georgia. The neighborhood, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places, informed what she thought a community should be. “It was very accessible for kids,” she said of Northwoods, which also had its own elementary school. “We had the run of the entire community.”
In high school, Kay heard a presentation about planned communities, which solidified her ambition to become a city planner. She received her undergraduate degree in urban planning at Michigan State University before coming to Harvard and the GSD for her master’s degree in city and regional planning.
At the GSD, she attended her quantitative analysis classes, where she saw a classmate that often questioned the faculty on statistical approaches. She saw him again at a Halloween party, where Kay’s friend said, “Oh, that’s David Nelson. He’s always challenging the professor.”
“She said that, and I thought, ‘Well, he’s always right!’” Kay said with a laugh. “We ended up studying together, and we both liked going for ice cream in the afternoons, and soon one thing led to another.”
“When I arrived at Harvard, I was a bit of a pain to the faculty,” David said, acknowledging that some of his professors were only a year or two older. He had spent time in high school working with his father, a municipal public works manager, and became interested in the public service element of forming the built environment. Studying sociology at Bates College led to a fondness for data and statistics. After a couple of years away from school, he applied to Harvard “on a wing and a prayer.”
“It’s still a huge honor,” David said of his graduate alma mater. “Everybody wants to go to Harvard, and nobody figures they can get in. I arrived there intimidated and confused, but two years later, I came out more confident.”
“I first noticed Kay in the lobby at Gund Hall waiting for a ride, and she gave me the biggest smile. I said to her, ‘You’re the girl in stats class.’ We became fast friends. And now here we are, 42 years, three children, and two grandchildren later.”
Both Kay and David went on to careers in public transit, focusing on subways and commuter railroads. Kay credits the GSD with providing the confidence and skills she needed to launch her own company, KKO and Associates, in 1984. That company, which David also worked for, offered software and planning structures for public transport and commuter rail systems domestically in cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, as well as overseas in countries like Poland, Argentina, and South Africa.
“When we were at the GSD, it was an egalitarian program with a lot of women,” Kay said. “I went to work in the railroad industry, which is male-dominated. But I had come out of Harvard believing I could do anything I wanted.”
Kay closed the company in 2015 and now works for Keolis, a French company that operates the Massachusetts commuter rail system. David is at a large engineering firm, working with cities like Toronto, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, on their ambitions for expanding public transit. He has also spent the last 10 years teaching a once-a-year graduate course in Paris about the railroads.
As a way of giving back to the educational institution that they say formed their lives, Kay and David named the GSD as a beneficiary of a life insurance policy they established. The couple pays a premium to a charitable foundation, which purchases and holds the life insurance policy for them, and Kay and David designate the beneficiaries and amounts. This planned gift makes them members of the H. Langford Warren Society, and they also give to the GSD as members of the Josep Lluís Sert Council.
“When earning money, you can make relatively modest contributions; when you’re gone, the money goes to your designated charities and philanthropic interests,” David said of the policy.
I couldn’t have gone to Harvard without financial aid. It’s important to us to give back and give forward so that people who might find attending Harvard a challenge can have that opportunity. The students are interesting, fascinating people.
“I couldn’t have gone to Harvard without financial aid,” Kay said. “It’s important to us to give back and give forward so that people who might find attending Harvard a challenge can have that opportunity. The students are interesting, fascinating people.”
This giving mechanism provided a simple, impactful way for Kay and David to support the passion, engagement, and initiative of GSD students—qualities that the two of them have carried forward in the four decades since leaving campus.
“As the twig is bent,” David said, “so grows the tree.”
A look back at a few of the projects and moments that marked the past year at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
June 2018
Thirty-five students are awarded fellowships through the GSD’s Community Service Fellowship Program. The Program provides opportunities for GSD students to apply the skills they have developed in their academic programs through direct involvement with projects that address public needs and community concerns at the local, national, and international level.
“Wavelength,” a public art installation designed by the GSD’s Daniel D’Oca MUP ’02 and his colleagues at Interboro Partners, Tobias Armborst MAUD ’02 and Georgeen Theodore MAUD ’02, brings color and shade to Harvard’s Science Center Plaza.
Farshid Moussavi is recognized with an Order of the British Empire award amid the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Moussavi receives an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire award in recognition of her contributions to the field of architecture.
July 2018
The GSD selects the Basel-based architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, design consultant, and New York-based Beyer Blinder Belle, architect of record, to design a significant transformation of the School’s primary campus building, Gund Hall, into a twenty-first-century center of design education and innovation.
The GSD-Courances Design Residency names its inaugural participants: Mariel Collard MLA ’19, MDes ’19 and Juan David Grisales MLA ’20, MDes ’20.
The Fall 2018 public program is announced, offering a lecture from Michael Van Valkenburgh, a conversation with Hannah Beachler, and an evening with Hans Ulrich Obrist, among many others.
“I hope my students will leave class seeing themselves as more empowered citizens.” Urban Planning and Design’s Abby Spinak discusses the courses she is leading this fall, what she hopes students will take away from them, and her design inspiration outside the classroom.
The American Planning Association honors two GSD candidates as recipients of each of its two APA Foundation Scholarship awards: Gina Ciancone MUP ’19 and Henna Mahmood MUP ’20.
September 2018
Talking Practice podcast—the first podcast series to feature in-depth interviews with leading designers on the ways in which architects, landscape architects, designers, and planners articulate design imagination through practice—debuts. Hosted by Grace La MArch ’95, initial guests include Reinier de Graaf, Jeanne Gang MArch ’93, and Paul Nakazawa MArch ’79.
The Guardian taps the GSD’s Jesse M. Keenan for a series on “climate migration” in America.
The culmination of a four-year investigation funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Druker Design Gallery exhibition “Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative” argues that the complexity of contemporary urban societies and environments makes communication and collaboration across professional boundaries and academic disciplines essential.
October 2018
Mohsen Mostafavi, dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, announces his intention step down at the end of the 2018-19 academic year. “I am proud of what we have accomplished together over the past 11 years, and I look forward to witnessing the School continue its collaborative ethos and engagement with Harvard and the world in the years to come.”
Sou Fujimoto discusses the relationship between nature and architecture as well as that between nature and man-made environment as part of the fall public program.
UPD’s Ann Forsyth is named Editor of Journal of the American Planning Association. “Professor Forsyth is a visionary among her peers in the planning profession, with an impressive record in both academia and professional practice,” says APA President Cynthia Bowen.
November 2018
Friends of The High Line, 2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design winner, is honored through an exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery.
Internationally renowned graphic designer Irma Boom delivers the 2018 Open House Lecture.
Platform 11: Setting the Table, the first student-led installment of the series, debuts at Open House.
Womxn in Design hosts “A Convergence at the Confluence of Power, Identity, and Design.” It marks the formation of a regional network of equity-focused design-centric student groups focused on re-imagining the intersection between identity and design.
December 2018
The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities announces the completion of HouseZero, the retrofitting of its headquarters in a pre-1940s building in Cambridge into an ambitious living laboratory and an energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency that will help us to understand buildings in new ways.
“No Sweat,” the 46th issues of Harvard Design Magazine, takes on the design of work and the work of design.
The six winners of the 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship are announced. The cohort includes a range of participants from academia, architecture, and media arts. Students in studio courses present their work to critics from the GSD and around the world during final reviews. Image (above) from the final review for “Natural Monument” led by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen.
AIA awards the 2019 Topaz Medallion to Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture. The award is considered the highest honor given to educators in architecture.
Taking up social and spatial equity in New York, the “Design and the Just City” exhibition opens at AIA’s Center for Architecture. The exhibition debuted in the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library as part of the Spring 2018 exhibitions program.
The Spring 2019 public program is announced, opening with a conversation led by Michael Jakob to introduce the exhibition Mountains and the Rise of Landscape.
“We were never considered fully human, so why should we care about this crisis?” Philosopher Rosi Braidotti discusses collective positivity in the face of human extinction ahead of her public program lecture.
The Library’s “Multiple Miamis” exhibition presents the city’s multiple personalities, with lessons for cities across the country.
“Streets are what make some cities great, and some cities not so great.” Janette Sadik-Khan addresses the GSD community to discuss her book Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution.
The 11th annual Platform exhibition, “Setting the Table,” goes up in the Druker Design Gallery.
Sarah Whiting is named the next dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A leading scholar, educator, and architect widely respected for her commitment to integrating design theory and practice, Whiting comes to the GSD from Rice University School of Architecture, where she has served as dean since 2010. She previously taught at the GSD early in her career.
The New York Times joins the GSD’s Jesse Keenan for a look at the future of Duluth as a “climigrant friendly city.”
Pioneering conceptual artist Agnes Denes addresses GSD students online. To accompany the piece, Denes created an original object, a six-foot-long scroll of the manifesto she composed in 1970 and which has guided her practice ever since. An artist edition of 1,000 copies of the manifesto designed by Zak Group is offered as a gift to students from Denes.
The Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics is made possible by a gift from Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. The position will explore a wide range of urban issues and data, including development, evolving land use patterns and property values, affordability, market and regulatory interactions, open space, consumer behaviors, and outcomes, and climate change, and will help inform the decisions of future architects and planners.
The community comes together to celebrate Dean Mostafavi’s 11 years leading the GSD with a “Final Revue.”
May 2019
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus School of Design, contributor Charles Shafaieh looks back at the history of Bauhaus performance and the contemporary ways in which GSD students interpreted Oskar Schlemmer works for a Spring 2019 course and event.
Polish architect Aleksandra Jaeschke wins the 2019 Wheelwright Prize. Her proposal, Under Wraps: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses, focuses on the spatiality of horticultural operations, as well as the interactions between plants and humans across a spectrum of contexts and cultures.
“You belong here.” Naisha Bradley, the GSD’s first Assistant Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, shares her vision for community-building.
Class Day speaker Teju Cole discusses the unpredictability and potential of the city ahead of his 2019 address.
The GSD launches the African American Design Nexus (AADN), a virtual collection that illuminates African American architects and designers from various generations, practices, and backgrounds. Its debut represents four years of research and development, a collaboration among Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union, Harvard GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi, architect Phil Freelon LF ’90, and Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, where AADN is housed.
The GSD awards 364 degrees during Harvard’s 368th Commencement.
I’m thrilled to be joining you today, July 1st, as your new dean. My excitement has everything to do with the distinction and breadth of the faculty, staff, students, and alumni that make up this School—your intellectual strengths and cultural generosities give me ever more enthusiasm for what lies ahead at the GSD and, more broadly, for the role of design as we steer our way into a now-maturing 21st century.
If the future is daunting—and it’s hard not to see the environmental, social, political, and economic horizons ahead as anything but—I remain steadfast in the belief that our horizon is also exhilarating. And I’m certain that the parts that will make up our new future are alive and well at the School.
Our days and semesters are filled with indispensable tools that live under headings like research, history, theory, policy, and technology. These tools shape, and rattle, our respective pursuits across the field of design. They also connect our departments and programs to each other and, more ambitiously, allow us to assert an elastic constellation signaling our greater ambitions as citizens in a world that has never needed us more…a world that taunts us with its promise even as it shows us its jagged edges.
I relish being part of our collective future and, most importantly, I’m provoked and inspired as I anticipate working with all of you to make it happen.
Til soon,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
About four miles from downtown Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River, the neighborhood of Hazelwood suffers acutely from forty years of economic decline following the collapse of the steel industry. Its once-beating heart, LTV Coke works, is a two-mile-long industrial complex that at its peak provided around six thousand jobs. LTV downsized drastically in the 1980s and closed for good in the 1990s. As a result, high unemployment, closing schools, and crumbling infrastructure proliferate in a neighborhood that has lost about half of its peak population of 13,000. Meanwhile, impoverished populations priced out of nearby gentrifying neighborhoods have moved in, compounding Hazelwood’s need for resources.
Though LTV’s 188-acre riverside tract is long since bulldozed except for a few isolated structures, a consortium of Pittsburgh’s leading non-profit foundations is redeveloping the site. Now renamed “Hazelwood Green,” the sustainability-driven and community-minded masterplan by architects Perkins + Will imagines a densely-built district of office buildings, housing units, green infrastructure, and a connective street grid. But the first project for a warehouse-turned-high-tech-lab is only partially complete, separated from the rest of Hazelwood by acres of still-blank remediated brownfield. A build-out will take years.
Even with the Perkins + Will plan in hand, Hazelwood Green is irresistible for speculation. More typical urban design studios might respond to the clean slate with utopian megastructures beyond the dreams of the real estate market. By contrast, Griffin and her multi-disciplinary studio frame the design process as an issue of justice, rather than strictly a project for real estate or form-making. Its aim more broadly is to confront America’s history of legislated and de facto segregation and make visible its associated discriminatory real estate and banking practices. Griffin’s definition of justice extends beyond racial and class parity to concerns of “economic recession, health and environmental issues–women’s health in particular–women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, [as well as] violence against black bodies.”
A graduate of Notre Dame, Griffin practiced architecture and gradually moved into urban planning and design over a ten-year career in S.O.M.’s Chicago office. After a Loeb Fellowship in urban planning and design at Harvard, she held a series of urban planning and design positions on the East Coast: Vice President of Planning for the Upper Manhattan Development Zone; Deputy Director of the D.C. Office of Planning; and Director of Community Development for the City of Newark, New Jersey. These provided additional material for her developing approach.
“What drove investment to some parts of the city, and what didn’t?” Griffin recalls questioning. “I kept seeing these patterns in every city that I worked in the United States, [which] I began to frame as conditions of injustice.” She cites Newark, where policies of municipal disinvestment and real estate discrimination have led to severe ghettoizing, as a reinforcement for her developing conviction “that the issues of a place and people were distinctly intertwined.”
As an educator, Griffin has refined her inclusive view of justice. She began teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2006. From 2011 to 2016 she taught at City College of New York, where she was the first director of the J. Max Bond Center for Design and the Just City. Now back at Harvard, she has founded the Just City Lab, where a cadre of student research assistants translates the ideas that underpin Griffin’s pedagogy and design practice into exhibitions and publications, such as “Design and the Just City,” which was on display at New York’s Center for Architecture, or the upcoming publication of her St. Louis studio, Urban Disobedience: 99 Provocations to Disrupt Injustice in St. Louis. Griffin’s professional practice also thrives. Her consulting with the City of Detroit culminated in a comprehensive city-wide plan, Detroit Future City Strategic Framework, and she is on the team that recently won the Chouteau Greenway competition in St. Louis.
One of Griffin’s most important innovations is also one of her most concise. The Just City Index is a roster of “50 values that we have intended for use by different communities and cities to develop their own visions for what it would take for their locales to be more just.” The Just City Lab mission statement describes the Index’s purpose: If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be—as a city, as a neighborhood—it would have a better chance of creating and sustaining healthier, more vibrant places with more positive economic, health, civic, cultural and environmental conditions.
Other such frameworks circulate in architecture and urban design as measures of community success, most often with fewer criteria. Griffin finds those too limited. “If you are not those ten or 15 things, then you are not living up to the aspiration of [their] framework,” she says. With its 50 entries, the Just City Index aims to cast a wide net and let participants choose and prioritize the values they think apply to their particular condition of injustice. The real difference is the starting point. Most such frameworks begin with the designers. The Just City Index instead empowers its users, allowing them “to assign themselves the values that are most important for them and that are needed to address the conditions of injustice on the ground at that moment in time.” Just City Lab researcher Natasha Hicks comments: “The beauty of the index [is that] it’s an accessible tool that communities can use to create a shared values system.” The Just City Index is a foundational tool for study in Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh, and plays an increasingly integral role in Griffin’s work.
The other tool for Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh is Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language, an eccentric classic first published in 1977. It identifies conditions that make spaces more welcoming, comfortable, and useful. Alexander’s patterns are vignettes of common-sense design–active shopping streets and houses with sheltering roofs; offices with windows and benches with good views–rather than complex or prescriptive forms. A Pattern Language covers scales from large to small–“towns and neighborhoods, houses, gardens, and rooms”–with nested interrelationships from one scale to the next. With 253 chapters, it is more effective as a reference than a narrative, but the language, says Laura Greenberg, a Master’s student in the Pittsburgh studio, “is easily accessible to people. It’s not in any kind of design jargon.” Alexander’s late-hippie egalitarianism meshes well with Griffin’s emphasis on inclusivity and diversity. “[T]owns and buildings will not be able to come alive,” Alexander writes, “unless they are made by all people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings.”
Griffin’s Pittsburgh studio engages four different sites: The Hill District is a traditionally black community that has a rich history, but has faced decades of struggle after being decimated by urban renewal projects in the 1960s. East Liberty and Garfield are neighborhoods where rapid redevelopment is causing gentrification. Beechview is a traditionally white working-class neighborhood where the Latinx population is growing but redevelopment is slow. And Hazelwood, with the massive Hazelwood Green redevelopment just beginning, is about to undergo significant change.
The combination of the Just City Index and A Pattern Language leads to expectedly principled-yet-amorphous patterns at a variety of scales. In a studio of twelve students, each one is responsible for producing four or five patterns. Greenberg’s are exemplary for their variety. She documents “a pattern of school vacancy which looked at closings of public schools from 2006 through 2012 and noting that nearly 70% of public schools in majority-black neighborhoods were closed, versus 20% in majority-white neighborhoods. There is still a large number of schools that remain vacant, especially in black communities, and the ones that have been redeveloped tend to be targeted for luxury condos, and don’t replicate the public good that a public school creates.”
Another pattern arising from the studio is that of the so-called “porch stigma” faced by residents in Hazelwood and other Pittsburgh communities who may have less of an ability to maintain their porch, or who use their porches in ways that run counter to dominant standards of urbanism. These factors leave residents vulnerable from a legal perspective to 2006 and 2009 porch furniture ordinances, as well as the stigma that surrounds a porch that doesn’t adhere to institutionalized norms.
By May, these patterns will take their final form, a pattern book describing policy, program and design strategies. Though she has a portfolio of tangible projects, evidenced in the “Design and the Just City” exhibit, Griffin emphasizes the roles of process and enfranchisement as true determinants of meaningful change. She says, “When I can step back and see that there are multiple types of leaders of the community having real ownership of both the process and the outcomes, that is success.”
On Thursday, April 11, 2019, Toni L. Griffin joined Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation, and urban planner and designer Maurice Cox in a discussion about the complex design, economic and political innovations required to create transformational change for Detroit.
For the past 18 years, DesignIntelligence has conducted and published the results of America’s Top Ranked Architecture & Design Schools survey, which asks hiring professionals, academics, students, and recent graduates to provide their perspective on the strengths of programs throughout in the United States.
The GSD is proud of the School’s leading position in the 2018 DesignIntelligence America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools rankings; our graduate architecture program was named first in the nation, reinforcing the GSD’s exceptional ability to prepare our graduates for professional practice. Our architecture program has ranked first for 17 of the past 18 years, and our landscape architecture program has led its field for the last 14 years, solidifying the GSD’s reputation as a model for design innovation and leadership.
The 2019 Hiring Professional and Student/Recent Graduate Surveys are now open for architecture & landscape architecture until Friday, May 31. If you are in a leadership or hiring position in a design-related field, we encourage you to complete the Hiring Professional Survey. If you have graduated within the past two years, you are invited to complete the Student Survey. Your participation is critical in influencing the results, which are used widely as a resource throughout the industry, the academy, and by prospective students.
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When Naisha Bradley was appointed Assistant Dean of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Graduate School of Design in 2019, it marked the first time in the school’s history that a role was created solely to ensure that women, underrepresented minorities, first-generation and LGBTQ+ community members—and anyone else from historically underrepresented communities–would have an equal place among the arbiters of culture at the GSD.
In her new role, Bradley serves as an advisor and resource for students, faculty and staff, a position that draws on her 13 years of experience working at Harvard as an advocate for women. As the former director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, an appointment she held since 2015, Bradley had been notable in spearheading the establishment of Harvard College’s Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Prior to that, she had spent nine years as program manager of the Kennedy School of Government’s Women and Public Policy Program, and in May 2018, she graduated from the Kennedy School with a Master’s in Public Administration.
“When you come [to Harvard] and you are a person who has never navigated this type of space before, you have to be reminded that it’s possible, even when you’re already here,” she says. In 2016, Bradley was recognized as one of Boston’s 25 Emerging Leaders by Get Konnected and named one of the 40 Under 40 top professionals by the Boston Business Journal. Today, she has a message for current and prospective students: “You belong here. This space is for you. The opportunities that are here are yours.”
You’ve been at Harvard for over 13 years. I imagine that you’ve seen many different facets of the Harvard prism over those years. How does that experience inform your work at the GSD?
I’ve been able to see Harvard from various vantage points, which gives me a different perspective on what’s possible. I know what a student feels like when there’s not a critical mass of their identity in the classroom. I know what it feels like to lead a team that looks different from me, but has a lot of the same desires for advancement and change. I’m a firm believer that in order for Harvard to continue to live up to its promise of excellence we have to create spaces within the Harvard ecosystem where all people can thrive.
You are also Harvard alumnus. There is a powerful photograph of you at commencement wearing a mortar board that reads “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” How does your personal history at the school affect your approach to creating inclusive spaces?
I’m the first Ivy League graduate in my family. Commencement was a really emotional time and moment for us. My family’s from the South, and we’re the descendants of slaves. When my grandparents migrated up north, they couldn’t read. Growing up, I would go to their home and read the newspaper to them, read their bills for them. My mother was a housing activist, but she never graduated from college; my father was a police officer, and he had graduated from high school, then returned to college as an adult learner. They would remind me that there were times our ancestors would have been killed for trying to learn to read. So for me to get to this space, after my parents sacrificed so much to get me through school, and to have grandparents who couldn’t read—I, in that moment of graduation, felt like I had stood on the backs of so many people. I hoped, if my grandparents were looking down on me, that message, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams,” would be the first thing they would see from above.
Naisha Bradley’s mortar board at her graduation from Harvard Kennedy School in 2018.
Now, I also attended a historically black college. It’s where I started my higher education experience, and it’s a huge part of what’s made me who I am. But to be at Harvard felt like a familial accomplishment. It wasn’t just about me. It was about my family that went back several generations who wanted to read but couldn’t, who wanted to learn but couldn’t.
When you come here and you are a person who has never navigated this type of space before, you have to be reminded that it’s possible, even when you’re already here. If we’re in spaces where there’s not a critical mass of us here, no matter if you’re LGTBQ-identified, if you’re gender-nonconforming, if you’re black, if you’re Latina, if you’re a woman studying a STEM field—whatever those dynamics are, I think we have to be reminded that we’re living a dream. No matter how many times the world is telling us that it can’t be done, we need to remind ourselves that it is. We’re living it and we have to take it all in.
What changes have you seen during your time at Harvard?
I’m excited about the momentum of change at this moment. The changes that President Bacow has made, some of the appointments that he’s made across schools—I think that those changes have been really inspiring for me, in particular as a black woman.
Beyond that, the changes that we’ve experienced in our society over the last couple of years have prompted a certain level of activism and advocacy, and a lot of people are being positioned to look at hard truths that they might previously have been blind to. It’s no longer about “I’m trying to do something”; it’s now about, “What are you doing?” So I’m excited to be at Harvard during a time where people are focusing on action, not just reaction. Something that excites me here is that I didn’t need to convince anyone that diversity, inclusion, and belonging needed to be here—people see its value, whether faculty, staff, or students.
I recognize that it’s also a challenging time because as a society we’re thinking about how the country has been built, and here at the GSD we’re thinking about building places for the future, engaging with concepts like sustainability and social justice.
When we talk about creating a more just world, a more resilient world—that project requires voices from everyone.
There are so many perspectives on what “just” means. “Justice” requires intentionality. In the pursuit of justice–a just city, a just society–there needs to be an openness and a respect for one another, and a willingness to listen to each other’s definitions of justice, fairness, and progress. As I approach my work, I assume good intent from those I’m engaging and listening to. We have to create the space for more conversations and do so with forgiving ears and with the understanding that people are going to make mistakes.
This is the first time in the GSD’s history that we’ve had a diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer. One of the ways that you’ve framed this position is that it’s a win already for students. What do you mean by that?
The GSD is at a ripe time for change, and this position is going to be a part of the change that’s needed. It’s really important to me that students in particular recognize that their voices are being heard. A lot of different people came together to create this role, and the dean listened to them, and now a person is here ready and willing and dedicated to doing the work. I also want to create a structure so that, long after I’m gone from the GSD, this position will be here and there will be a flexible, adaptable structure here to get this work done, so that it no longer has to land on the backs of people who were doing so many other things to keep this community thriving and flourishing.
As I approach my work, I assume good intent from those I’m engaging and listening to. We have to create the space for more conversations and do so with forgiving ears and with the understanding that people are going to make mistakes.
This is an inaugural position, and I recognize that the work of diversity, inclusion, belonging has previously been carried out by people who were doing lots of other things, too. So it’s tempting to look at this position and say: Here is what’s been done before and here’s what you should be doing. We can look at this role from that perspective, looking at a deficit—here’s this new administrator, and here’s the work that hasn’t been done and that needs to happen—or we can look and say, “This is the beginning.”
What are some of the core principles or approaches in a role like yours?
Listen to the concerns people have and what they feel like needs to get done. In every space, there’s a system in place that has made it look the way it does, made it operate the way it does. Understand what that system is. Here at the GSD, I have to look and see what kind of culture and system has created some of the challenges we face, and figure out how to penetrate that culture in a way that’s strategic, intentional, and feels respectful.
What about prospective students who are curious about Harvard?
I would say, “You belong here.” I would say, “This space is for you. The opportunities that are here are yours, here for you to take.” I remembered a feeling of imposter syndrome when I was accepted into the Kennedy School. When I got my letter, I didn’t want to tell my parents. I wanted to call admissions first and ask them if it was true. I was in a space where I was like, Could this be for me? But what I’ve learned is, Harvard is no longer for one type of person, and that is the key to true excellence.
On April 12, 2019, during a celebration at the Frances Loeb Library, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) Alumni Council honored three current students—Chantine Akiyama MArch ’19, Sidra Fatima MUP ’19, and Natalie Wang MDes ’19—with the 2019 Unsung Hero Book Prize.
From left: Laura Lubin, alumni relations and annual giving manager; Alumni Council member John di Domenico MAUD ’79; Chantine Akiyama MArch ’19; Sidra Fatima MUP ’19, Natalie Wang MDes ’19; Alumni Council member Chris Bourassa AMDP ’09; and Ann Whiteside, librarian/assistant dean for information services.
Now in its thirteenth year, the prize celebrates GSD students who act in selfless ways to make the School a better place. Deserving students are nominated each spring by fellow GSD students, faculty, and staff, and winners are selected by the Alumni Council. The winners are presented with a book of their selection by the Council, and a second copy is donated to the Loeb Library with a bookplate commemorating the award.
Chantine’s book selection was Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality edited by Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, and Phillip James Tabb. A Los Angeles native in the final year of her Master in Architecture I degree, Chantine also holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from MIT. She chose to become an architect because of its avenues for artistic expression, and she seeks to curate the aura of spaces to bring joy and wonder to those who inhabit it. One nominator said of Chantine: “She surpassed my perception of ‘leadership’—she does not take advantage of her position, but quietly fulfills her responsibilities with genuine love, care, and integrity. After knowing her, I feel more calm, rooted, and welcomed in the community.”
Sidra selected Resilience, Environmental Justice and the City edited by Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Manuel Vallee, and Beatrice Frank. From southern California, Sidra is in the final year of the Master in Urban Planning program concentrating in environmental planning and community and neighborhood development, with a focus on climate change adaptation. She earned her bachelor’s degree in urban and regional planning from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, with a minor in geographic information systems. A nominator said of Sidra: “I don’t think I would feel as at home at the GSD if it wasn’t for Sidra. She encourages you to imagine; she encourages you to feel at home with your questions and unknowns. I leave every conversation with Sidra with some fire, feeling like the impossible is just a bit more possible.”
Natalie’s book selection was Sun Path House and Other Cosmic Architectures edited by Christian Wassmann and Hendrik Schwantes. Born in Vancouver, Canada, to a Chilean mother and Taiwanese father, Natalie spent her childhood in Chile and Vancouver’s Musqueam Native Reservation. She pursued her undergraduate education at Parsons The New School For Design, where she received a bachelor’s degree in strategic design and management. At the GSD, she in the final year of her Master in Design Studies degree with a concentration in Risk and Resilience. One nominator said of Natalie: “She still is the person around Gund that I point to as a person everyone knows because she doesn’t fail to say hi to anyone she has met, even just once. If we talk about engaging in community, advancing design in leadership, and contributing to the daily life at the GSD, Natalie has contributed boldly and silently.”
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Natalie Wang MDes ’19 with her book selection Sun Path House and Other Cosmic Architectures by Christian Wassmann and Hendrik Schwantes. She is photographed with Alumni Council members John di Domenico MAUD '79 (left) and Chris Bourassa AMDP '09 (right).
More than 40 GSD students were nominated for the Unsung Hero Book Prize for 2018-2019. Read more about the Prize’s tenth anniversary, celebrated in 2016.
Wendy Shattuck and Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 at the 2019 Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize celebration.
The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce the establishment of the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics, made possible by a gift from Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80 and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. The position will be able to explore a wide range of urban issues and data, including: development, evolving land use patterns and property values, affordability, market and regulatory interactions, open space, consumer behaviors and outcomes, climate change, and will help inform the decisions of future architects and planners.
“Investments in cities and the built environment drive growth in local, regional, national, and global economies. Our students are committed to using design to create opportunities in these urban environments,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. “With this new faculty expertise and support, the GSD presents an ideal environment for planners and designers of the future to investigate best practices in new urban development, overcoming the hurdles that come with building in cities. The GSD is grateful to Sam and Wendy, two of the school’s most loyal advocates and generous donors, for their gift to create this position and keep the school on the leading edge of design education.”
“Using the tools of urban economics research to evaluate and measure the societal impacts of development should inform design and planning decisions,” said Plimpton. “As the world’s top design school, Harvard and the GSD are the best places for exploring these issues and advancing both urban economics and excellence in design. I appreciate all the work that Dean Mostafavi and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Diane Davis, have done to set the foundation for this professorship, and I look forward to seeing what scholars in this position will achieve at Harvard.”
For Plimpton, Partner Emeritus and Senior Advisor at the Baupost Group, L.L.C, this gift is the latest chapter in a long partnership with the GSD. In December 2015, Plimpton and Professor William Poorvu MBA’58 established the Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize, which honors and recognizes students whose work produced at the GSD exemplifies both feasibility and excellence in design. Plimpton received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and worked as an independent advisor, developer, and investor in real estate ventures. He held a research appointment in Real Estate at Harvard Business School from 1978 to 1980, and was an early supporter and a founding member of the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative, a cross-faculty initiative from 2002 to 2015.
“Sam Plimpton is a visionary leader helping make the study of urban economics central to contemporary urbanism, and vice versa. We are thrilled that he has shared his aspirations in this regard with GSD,” said Diane E. Davis, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. “With a dynamic real estate program already embedded in the school, and with its strong links to urban planning and design, the GSD will be able to move this vision forward in the years to come. I have great expectations about the exciting new research directions and practical applications that we will see as a result of this new faculty position.”
Sarah Whiting, dean of architecture at Rice University, will return to Harvard, where she taught early in her career, as the next dean of the Graduate School of Design.
Sarah Whiting, a leading scholar, educator, and architect widely respected for her commitment to integrating design theory and practice, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), University President Larry Bacow announced.
A Harvard GSD faculty member early in her career, Whiting has served since 2010 as dean of the Rice University School of Architecture, where she is the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture. She is also co-founder and partner of WW Architecture, a firm she launched with her partner, Ron Witte, in 1999.
Whiting will assume the GSD deanship on July 1, succeeding Mohsen Mostafavi, who is stepping down after more than 11 years of distinguished service.
“Sarah Whiting is an outstanding leader with broad interests that range across the design disciplines and beyond,” said Bacow in announcing the appointment. “She has a keen understanding of the intellectual dimensions of design and its distinctive power to shape the world of ideas. And she has an equally keen understanding of design as a force for shaping the communities we inhabit and for engaging with some of contemporary society’s hardest challenges. I have been deeply impressed by her during the course of the search, and I greatly look forward to welcoming her back to Harvard.”
The GSD has long been a center of gravity for my thinking and actions, and I’m thrilled to be returning. It is altogether tantalizing to look across the School’s three departments, with their individual and collective capacities to shape new horizons within Gund Hall. And it’s even more enticing to envision working with the GSD’s remarkable faculty, students, staff, and alumni to help imagine and create new futures for the world, not just at Harvard but beyond.
“The GSD has long been a center of gravity for my thinking and actions, and I’m thrilled to be returning,” Whiting said. “It is altogether tantalizing to look across the School’s three departments, with their individual and collective capacities to shape new horizons within Gund Hall. And it’s even more enticing to envision working with the GSD’s remarkable faculty, students, staff, and alumni to help imagine and create new futures for the world, not just at Harvard but beyond.”
As dean at Rice, Whiting said she has been guided by an overarching commitment to “dissolving the divide between architecture as an intellectual endeavor and architecture as a form of engaged practice.” She has led efforts to reform the curriculum, introduce innovative studio options, recruit faculty, boost funding for research and course development, enhance facilities, and raise new resources.
Her interests are broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at their core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she has particular interest in architecture’s relationship with politics, economics, and society and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life. Her work has been published in leading journals and collections, and she is the founding editor of Point, a book series aimed at shaping contemporary discussions in architecture and urbanism.
In recent years, Whiting has been recognized as an educator of the year by the publication DesignIntelligence (2014, 2018), by Architectural Record magazine’s Women in Architecture program (2017), and by the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects (2016).
“Sarah Whiting has earned an extraordinary reputation as dean of the School of Architecture at Rice, where she has pursued educational innovations while building connections across the university,” said Harvard Provost Alan Garber. “She is similarly committed to strengthening connections across the departments of the GSD and between the GSD and the rest of Harvard. At a time when the role of design is increasingly important, and when design education and practice face an array of challenges, her creativity, wisdom, and leadership experience will help the GSD navigate the changing demands of the design professions and the evolving interests of our faculty and students. She is the right person to lead the School forward.”
Whiting has held many other leadership roles at Rice, chairing search committees for the dean of graduate studies, the dean of humanities, and the director of Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts. She sits on the Rice board of trustees’ buildings and grounds design subcommittee and has been active in the university’s efforts to engage with its home city of Houston.
Before becoming dean at Rice, Whiting served on the Princeton architecture faculty as assistant professor from 2005 to 2009. From 1999 to 2005, she was a design critic, assistant professor, and associate professor in the Harvard GSD’s Department of Architecture. She also has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida.
A graduate of Yale College, Whiting earned her MArch degree from Princeton and her PhD in architectural history, theory, and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in her career, she practiced with the architects Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves.
In announcing her appointment, Bacow expressed thanks to the “many members of the GSD community — faculty, students, staff, alumni — who offered thoughtful advice during the search. Provost Alan Garber and I are grateful to all of you — and especially to our faculty advisory committee, whose members provided valuable counsel throughout. Special thanks go again to Mohsen Mostafavi, whose devoted service as dean these past 11-plus years has guided the GSD’s continuing leadership and progress.”
“Sarah Whiting is an exemplary academic leader and colleague. Her intellectual commitment to design education has enhanced the future of practice,” Mostafavi said of his successor. “I am delighted that she will be returning to the GSD to help shape the next phase of this incredible School’s journey.”
Please click the studio title for full descriptions of each studio.
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE
AMERICAN GOTHIC, MONUMENTS FOR SMALL-TOWN LIFE
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
At a time when recent political developments have brought attention to the small towns of the American Midwest, the studio proposes to design a public building in provincial Ohio, trying to imagine how public space and collective buildings could contribute to shaping the future of a community, and so contribute to overcoming its current fragility.
A NOVEL MUSEUM
Johannes Kuehn, Wilfried Kuehn, Simona Malvezzi
The objective of this studio is to advance design proposals for the museum of the 21st century. Acknowledging the important shifts taking place in the realm of collecting and exhibiting with the advent of time-based and performative art, the student’s task is to rethink the structure of the contemporary museum. Studio trip to Berlin, Germany.
HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER?
Iñaki Abalos
The studio aims to construct a new ecology of humans and non-humans, a modality of a New Palace centered around one of the deepest paradoxes of our time… How can we live together? Studio trip to San Francisco.
MODEL AS BUILDING – BUILDING AS MODEL 2
George L. Legendre
This is the second -and final- installment of a critical exploration of the phenomenon known as ‘model as building—building as model,’ whereby buildings of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere -except on site—using the latest materials, information technology, fundraising models, and cultural trending. Studio trip to Scotland.
RECASTING THE OUTCASTS
Jeanne Gang, Claire Cahan
One group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced are the Brutalist structures of the 1960s and ’70s. In this studio, we will explore how these buildings might convert their specific “waste-time” into a benefit.
SETOUCHI (SETO INLAND SEA) STUDIO
Toshiko Mori
The Seto Inland Sea in western Japan has historically been an active location for trade, marine activities, fishing industries, and tourism. The government commissioned Tange to design a Gymnasium here in 1964. In this studio, we will imagine a new program for the gymnasium re-aligning it within the region’s society into the future.
THE ANAMORPHIC DOUBLE: A BRIDGE FOR DC
Grace La, James Dallman
Students in this studio will explore the creative tension and formal possibilities inherent in the resolution of the physics and aesthetics of the bridge typology, while confronting the monumental scale of the nation’s capital within the context of the nation’s most iconic civic realm, the Mall in Washington DC.
THE NEW GENERIC
Sharon Johnston
This studio will investigate new forms of ephemerality and adaptability in spaces for living and working through the design of a tall building in Miami, Florida. The studio will merge the typologies of the deep plan office building and the parking structure with scenarios of diverse working and living programs.
ZERO ENERGY RESIDENTIAL HIGH-RISE
Ali Malkawi, Gordon Gill
The studio will investigate developing a zero energy residential high-rise building design. To better understand the influence of site and environmental conditions, the focus will be on two climate conditions typical of China and the Mideast, and two separate sites, Shenzhen and Dubai.
DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
SUPERBLOOM: SHELTER, DROUGHT, AND SCULPTURE IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT
James Lord, Roderick Wyllie
This studio will focus on the Yucca Valley, CA, and its adjacent desert settlements. Students will consider the desert as a physical and metaphysical void, exploring opportunities to amplify experiences of both sublimity and reflection within the void.
FIELD WORK: BREXIT, BORDERS, AND IMAGINING A NEW CITY-REGION FOR THE IRISH NORTHWEST
Niall Kirkwood, Gareth Doherty
Focused on a cross-border area between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the studio will give form to a region (the Northwest City Region) which is arguably already in existence culturally and institutionally, but not well articulated formally through mappings and visual and spatial boundaries.
THE MONOCHROME NO-IMAGE
Rosetta S. Elkin
A 10,000-year-old barrier island formation named Captiva, Florida will be the focus of our studio research, helping to bring together otherwise disparate phenomena that settle upon it but have thus far been considered independent: the reprise of hurricanes, the mobility of sand, the impressions of concrete foundations and the salty, algal permanence of seawater.
BUILD WITH LIFE: TRANSFORMATION + FORMATION: LANDSCAPE AND ISLAMIC CULTURE
Catherine Mosbach
The uprisings of the North African Arab Spring exposed the fragility of countries whose citizens were eager to revisit and adapt their identities in the face of a changing world. The focus of the studio is Tunisia, the country in which the uprisings first began. The purpose of the studio will be to reimagine the penitentiary infrastructure as a place of learning that promotes humanitarian behavior.
DEPARTMENT OF URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN
DESIGNING ATMOSPHERES AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL INTERACTION
Jose Luis Vallejo
With the arrival of the digital era, new kinds of communities have appeared. The studio will look at new opportunities in the Greater Boston area for the creation of hybrid physical-digital urban atmospheres that can enhance social interaction.
EXTREME URBANISM 6: DESIGNING SANITATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Rahul Mehrotra
This studio examines the issue of sanitation infrastructure in Mumbai, with a special focus on community toilets in the city’s informal settlements. The site is an informal settlement with an organized community group that will serve as the constituency or client group for the studio.
FUTURE OF STREETS IN LOS ANGELES
Andres Sevtsuk
This studio will investigate the impact of new mobility technologies on the built environment of LA, seeking solutions that maximize multi-modal, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes for the city.
LARGE SCALE PROJECTS TO CREATE NEW CENTRALITIES IN SHANGHAI. POTENTIALS FOR THE REGULAR CITY
Joan Busquets, Dingliang Yang
The studio focuses on a study of capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example of Shanghai and its Expo 2010 to investigate their potential for creating one or several centralities in this diverse, dynamic city.
RE-THINKING A HUMANIST SKYSCRAPER CITY
Moshe Safdie, Jaron Lubin
As a whole, we architects have advanced the tall tower typology very little in the past century, beyond our ability to grow it taller and more environmentally efficient. This studio will research visions of the past, develop master plans for an active development site in Chicago, and develop a building proposal on a parcel within the larger master plan.
Pictured above from left: Michael F. “Mick” Doyle MArch ’77, Francisco Colom MDes ’19, and Pat Sekler AM ’58, PhD ’73, BF ’76 (the late Professor Sekler’s wife) at the GSD’s Grounded Visionaries Campaign Celebration in April 2018.
As the first Eduard Sekler Fellow, Francisco Colom MDes ’19 is embracing the legacy of the beloved Professor Sekler through his work in conservation and the tensions between progress and tradition. Colom is an architect, urban designer, and Master in Design Studies (MDes) candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). Eduard Franz Sekler served on the Harvard University faculty for more than 50 years at both the GSD and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Among his numerous achievements was co-founding the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and advocating for the preservation of cultural and architectural sites around the world.
The Eduard Sekler Fellowship Fund was created to honor Professor Sekler’s legacy at the GSD. Mick Doyle MArch ’77, who first met Professor Sekler as a GSD student, then teaching assistant, and who maintained a life-long friendship and association with Professor Sekler through projects including the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, led the effort. A broad range of alumni and friends supported the fellowship, and a significant contribution from Dr. Ellen Phoebe “Epi” Wiese PhD ’53, PhD ’59 ensured the Eduard Sekler Fellowship Fund at the GSD in perpetuity.
Sekler’s passion for preservation lives on in the work of Colom and his MDes concentration of Critical Conservation, which provides designers, real estate professionals, planners, and others with a foundation to understand the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places. Colom’s research focuses on embedded and temporal cultural systems, the tensions between progress and tradition, and the way clashes of meaning and identity are registered by the built environment. His thesis considers the Maison Tropicale, a prefabricated housing system originally designed by architect Jean Prouvé to address the shortage of housing in French colonies in West Africa during the 1950s and how Western media and institutions use modernist architecture as a tool for cultural domination today. Colom serves as Teaching Assistant for the course “Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence” and is the editor of More Than Green, a project directed by a platform of professionals and academicians that promotes a holistic understanding of sustainability in the urban environment.
“By awarding me the Sekler Fellowship, you have lightened my financial burden which allows me to focus more on the most important aspect of school, learning,” wrote Colom to Pat Sekler AM ’58, PhD ’73, BF ’76. He continues: “I will work very hard to make the most of this opportunity. Thank you again for your generosity and support.”
Colom received his Master of Architecture degree with honors from the University of Alicante in Spain and was appointed Honorary Professor of the Department of Architectural Design. Professional highlights include a diverse range of architectural and urban projects in the Netherlands, Spain, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. His work has been exhibited at the 15th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and his academic research grants include the Fundacion La Caixa Fellowship, the European Union Tempo Project Scholarship, and the Harvard GSD Community Service Fellowship. For his GSD Community Service Fellowship, he joined MASS Design Group, co-founded by Alan Ricks MArch ’10 and Michael Murphy MArch ’11, as a Community Service Program Fellow working in support of their mission of researching, building, and advocating for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. His projects included collaborating on a project for the holistic improvement of a vulnerable neighborhood in Asuncion, Paraguay, in which community participation strategies were central to the design process and designing an education center to complement the program of a hospital in Monrovia, Liberia.
After graduation, Colom plans to work with fellow MDes student Maclean Sarbah MDes ’19, with the aim of finding and applying design strategies where they can potentially be most beneficial. They began the partnership with a trip to Sarbah’s native Ghana during which they reflected on the ways design can make a positive impact in the lives of people when introduced collaboratively and sensitively.
The GSD joins with Francisco Colom and the future Sekler Fellows in thanking the many alumni and friends whose generous contributions helped to establish this enduring financial aid award in memory of the incomparable Professor Eduard Sekler.
If you have questions about the Sekler Fellowship or about financial aid at the GSD, please contact Joe Chart at [email protected]or at 617-384-8604.
Through leadership and innovative design, James Lord MLA ’96 and Roderick Wyllie MLA ’98 of SURFACEDESIGN INC. have established an international reputation in urban design and sustainable landscape architecture. Founded in 2001, the award-winning practice creates dynamic parks, plazas, waterfronts, civic landscapes, and private gardens. Highlights include the Smithsonian Master Plan, Auckland International Airport, Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary Plaza, and ASLA award-winning IBM Plaza in Honolulu.
Lord and Wyllie have long-standing ties to the GSD. Lord is an emeritus member of the GSD Alumni Council. They are both active in the pedagogy for the School and in engaging their community by hosting an event in San Francisco around their fall 2017 option studio “Phantom Coast: Transforming San Francisco’s Eastern Waterfront.” The option studio considered the imaginative potential of the Embarcadero Seawall as both innovative infrastructure and engaging public space. This spring (spring 2019), they have returned to the GSD to teach the option studio “SUPERBLOOM: Shelter, Drought, and Sculpture in the California Desert” which focused on the Yucca Valley, CA, and its adjacent desert settlements. The studio is confronting the nature of shelter in the desert environment, the history of utopian modernism, and broader intersections of the aesthetic and the environmental in a rapidly changing climate.
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FIRST (F)LIGHT, Auckland International Airport LTD.
Hear from Lord and Wyllie on their experience teaching options studios and about their time at the GSD.
1. Tell us about your background.
RW: Born and raised in San Francisco and have a BA in Music.
JL. I was born at the Queen of Angels Hospital on the 101 Freeway Los Angeles and raised in Palos Verdes Estates in CA, an Olmsted designed community. My prior degrees include a 5-year Bachelor of Architecture from USC.
2. What is the most significant thing you learned while at the GSD?
RW: The most significant thing I took away from my time at the GSD is the conceptualization of any piece of work. The spark of an idea must be honored through the process of change to its life in the world.
JL: To think big, express yourself, and make friends across the trays.
3. Looking back, what experiences at the GSD were the most helpful in shaping your career (these can be seen broadly as courses, student activities, lectures, conferences, etc.)?
RW: The design process to me feels so linked to my experience in studying music, specifically the slow persistent focus on practice.
JL: Being able to engage directly with the leaders in the field of landscape architecture such as Michael Van Valkenburgh, Gary Hilderband MLA ’85, Martha Schwartz GSD ’77, George Hargreaves MLA ’79 at the critical point within the profession when landscape stopped taking a backseat to architecture and began to lead the conversation on how design shapes the built environment. In addition, I created an independent study studio with Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 where I was able to visit Roberto Burle Marx and learn from him. This also created an opportunity to meet Roderick Wylie.
4. Tell us about your professional careers.
RW: I worked for several Landscape Architects that I admire. Martha Schwartz GSD ’77, Peter Walker MLA ’57, Marta Fry MLA ’86, and Ron Lutsko. I have been extremely lucky to spend time in the studios of these people.
JL: My professional career in landscape architecture consists of 4 years with George Hargreaves, 4 months with Martha Schwartz GSD ’77, and 8 years with Peter Walker MLA ’57 all which culminated in starting Surface Design 13 years ago. Working intimately and learning from these master architects at pivotal points of their own amazing careers greatly influenced how to run a rigorous design firm and to build poetry in everything landscape from the Lisbon World Expo to the Sydney Olympic Games to the Auckland Waterfront.
5. James is an emeritus member of the GSD Alumni Council, and you both are active in the alumni community. What value have you seen in engaging with fellow GSD alumni?
RW: We have hosted many events in our office and will continue to do so. I think the connection to alumni on the west coast feels like an important contribution to maintain relationships that may feel far away. And for selfish reasons is always inspiring to see what people are doing—how their paths have evolved over the years.
JL: Connecting with different colleagues from across the design community and learning what is going on in their lives after the GSD.
6. This Spring (spring 2019), you are teaching the option studio “SUPERBLOOM: Shelter, Drought, and Sculpture in the California Desert.” What drives your interest in the Yucca Valley? What makes this studio relevant now? (see images from the studio trip below replies)
RW: The studio has several overlapping and at times conflicting areas of focus. The spectacular and extreme landscape of the desert feels like an ideal place for exploring ideas in the landscape that will push students to find their own voice—in some ways confront the elemental inspiration of design. Also, the desert provokes so many conversations about ecology (drought and the regional reality of a dry and increasingly warmer climate), culture of the west etc.
JL: The power and serenity of the desert have always fascinated me since I first camped there as a boy. Understanding that something so harsh could be so fragile at the same time. As the world gets warmer and our environment changes, the desert is a perfect opportunity to investigate living on the bare essentials and adjusting to radically different conditions that are in constant flux.
Photo captured during “SUPERBLOOM: Shelter, Drought, and Sculpture in the California Desert” studio trip.
7. The studio trip will align with Desert X, a contemporary art exhibition in the Coachella Valley. What do you hope students will take away from this experience?
RW: The students’ ability evaluate the function of art in the landscape—politically and formally.
JL: Understanding how scale and integration of a landscape through art can expand interpretation of the design on multivalent levels.
8. Your studio is open to both Landscape Architecture and Architecture students. What benefits do you see in bringing these disciplines together?
RW: Our office is populated by architects, landscape architects, furniture designers, graphic designers, etc. Our work is essentially collaborative. In my opinion, contemporary practice needs to embrace a cross-disciplinary approach.
JL: The idea of shelter is one that crosses over both disciplines (landscape and architecture), how that engages with the seemingly vast scale of the inhospitable desert provides a mechanism where both professions need to utilize the full spectrum of their design experience in order to survive.
9. In fall 2017, you taught the option studio “Phantom Coast: Transforming San Francisco’s Eastern Waterfront” considering the imaginative potential of the Embarcadero Seawall as both innovative infrastructure and engaging public space. What was most memorable about this studio?
RW: The students’ diverse approach to addressing the complex and very real problem of sea level rise in San Francisco. No two projects were the same but all incredibly imaginative.
JL: Seeing the design diversity and innovation the students brought to the reimagining of the sea wall and how the Port of San Francisco embraced the ideas and carefully influenced them in thinking beyond a wall.
10. About what design problems are you passionate?
RW: Design problems that integrate intuition, pragmatism, and poetry.
JL: Rethinking all the standard approaches to the built environment. Each site and location has its unique voice that should be celebrated and amplified. It is only by listening to the stories of each place that we truly connect to the history and poetry of a place—one should know that they are in Auckland rather than Oakland, and vice versa.
11. Who or what inspires you and your work?
RW:
Gardens—traditional and contemporary an endless catalogue of places that constantly inform our work—we are passionate about the contribution that is found in the study or gardens:
Such as Lotus Land in Santa Barbara, Iford Manor in Wiltshire, Gambaria outside of Florence, Brecy in Normandy, Sitio Burle Marx…..
Contemporary art—so much to list:
Painting of Laura Owens, Jonas Woods, Pat Steir, Jonathan Lyndon Chase…Sculpture of Edmund de Wall, Sterling Ruby, Carol Bove, Ugo Rondinone
And for me music—more and more realizing how connected my design work is to music
Contemporary music—David Lang, La Monte Young, Alva Noto, Julia Holter…
JL: The entire world around us is a constant source of inspiration, however true inspiration comes from traveling and spending time in new places, seeing art, meeting people. Also, my partner Roderick Wyllie and the rest of our office is inspirational to me.
12. How has the GSD changed since you were a student?
RW: The digital design process is a huge change.
JL: On the design side not much has changed, there is still an amazing rigor and dedication to innovation, but is a kinder space than I remember for sure.
13. What about the GSD currently excites you? (Could be activities, events, research, lectures, etc.)
RW: Focus on social practice—digital design process
JL: The students
14. What advice do you have for GSD students and/or alumni?
RW: I think it is important to trust your unique design voice and at the same time to be generous to the creative people that surrounded you.
JL: Be inspired and don’t hold back. Opportunity is out there.
15. Where do you go to feel inspired?
RW: Travel—exploring cities.
JL: I close my eyes and dream. I also visit galleries and gardens, wherever there is culture.
16. What would surprise us about you?
RW: I play clarinet in an ensemble inspired by Greek Rebetiko music.
JL: I can do the Haka.
17. We’ve heard that you are currently working on a monograph of your work (Monacelli Press) featuring a chapter by Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Are you in a place that you can share more?
RW: The book is in many ways a conversation (with an actual conversation with Anita) about the practice we have created. It is a moment in time not the final word by any means but a snapshot. Anita has inspired us to locate some of the ideas and themes that are found in our work.
JL: We are currently working on a Monograph that will include some of our built works with Monacelli Press, which includes a series of interviews with Anita.
Dean Mohsen Mostafavi (far left) with John May MArch ’02 (center) and review participants during the final review for the fall 2017 course “Experiments in Computer Graphics.”
Dear Alumni and Friends,
With the passing of each academic year, our community has the opportunity to reflect on our many accomplishments and to anticipate and imagine future achievements. The previous fiscal year saw some significant milestones for the GSD, including the energizing and successful final year of our Grounded Visionaries campaign, the University’s capital campaign, and some important leadership appointments. As always, the talent, dedication, and optimism of our community this year remind us why we engage in our project and what we can accomplish when we listen to, collaborate with, and encourage each other.
This Annual Report represents a synthesis of everything we have pursued and accomplished over the past fiscal year and how the GSD—through its pedagogy, collaborations, and community—leads the conversation about the future of design.
As we continue to investigate the question of how design can respond to urgent challenges and opportunities in cities, nations, and ecologies around the world, design research and its translation to applied innovation remain the cornerstone of this effort. In the pages ahead, you will read about the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, which celebrated the commissioning of its much anticipated “HouseZero” project last April (see page 27). With generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we also launched the “Future of the American City” initiative last spring, announcing our inaugural research projects in the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. I hope you will also visit the Research (see page 26) and Philanthropic Support (see page 44) sections of this Report to learn more about the many exciting opportunities we are pursuing. Some of the most groundbreaking dialogue and progress at the GSD take place in our courses and studios. Each of our departments has the opportunity to bring leading practitioners to the GSD and to engage students in site visits around the world, ranging from Marina Tabassum’s architectural exploration in Bangladesh to Eelco Hooftman and Bridget Baines’s look at Mount Desert Island in Maine, not to mention important investigations of our home city of Cambridge and neighboring areas. Please take a moment to learn about these and other department highlights on pages 13, 17, and 18.
The opportunity to not only gather but also share, celebrate, and reflect on the richness of our work is significant, and I am always impressed by how creatively and powerfully we illustrate our pursuits to the rest of the world. We invite and hear from many enormously talented speakers, whose perspectives enrich our learning and our community (see pages 33–37). Special moments last year included an October symposium in celebration of the 100th birthday of our friend and GSD alumnus I. M. Pei MArch ’46, as well as our second Black in Design Conference, organized by students in the GSD’s African American Student Union. In celebrating a generous gift from Ronald M. Druker LF ’76, we named our main exhibition space the Druker Design Gallery. In January, K.Michael Hays and Andrew Holder filled this Gallery with its inaugural exhibition, “Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech,” which brought together a rich diversity of work from the GSD community and beyond Gund Hall. The many other fascinating and rewarding exhibitions and publications produced this past year are listed on pages 38–39 and 42–43.
As we recognized the change in leadership from Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust to President Lawrence S. Bacow in summer 2018, we also celebrated a leadership change of our own: the appointment of Mark Lee MArch ’95 as chair of our Department of Architecture. We also thanked Beth Kramer, associate dean for development and alumni relations, for her years of dedication to the School and for leading us through a successful capital campaign. The Development and Alumni Relations Office, along with the many faculty and staff who assisted in the work of the Campaign, made this final year a powerful one, and I hope you will read more about their work and impact on pages 44–47.
As we look back in this Annual Report at what we have accomplished, we are reminded of our potential, especially at this pivotal moment for the design fields and for the GSD. I hope it inspires you to engage with the School in the coming year and to remain committed to empowering the next generation of design leaders and innovators.
Click to read the 2017-2018 Annual Report.
Best,
Mohsen Mostafavi
Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design
Pete Walker MLA ’57 (fourth from left) with GSD Dean Mohsen Mostafavi (far left), Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 (second from right) and six of the Pete Walker and Partners Fellows.
Sophia Geller MLA ’17 lived and worked at the Château de Courances, a 16th-century domaine located in the Ile-de-France region of France working in its farm, forest, and park. Paola Sturla MLA ’11 considered how technology influences the way we design through her travels in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Geller and Sturla shared their experiences at a celebration of the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship, which was created by a generous gift from Pete Walker MLA ’57 and his firm PWP Landscape Architects. The Fellowship offers recipients the rare opportunity to travel anywhere and in a time frame that works with their careers and artistic inquiry. Established in 2004 and awarded annually by the Landscape Architecture faculty to a graduating student for accomplishment in landscape design, the Fellowship has become one of the most prestigious awards in the Department and the School.
Pete was the recipient of the Jacob Weidenmann Prize when he graduated from the GSD, and he credits the travel made possible by this prize as essential to his development as a designer. Over his five-decade career, Pete Walker has been influential on the field of landscape architecture. The range of his projects is expansive—from the design of small gardens to the planning of cities, with a particular emphasis on corporate headquarters, plazas, cultural gardens, academic campuses, and urban-regeneration projects. In 1983, he formed Pete Walker and Partners, now known as PWP Landscape Architecture. At the GSD, Walker served as Chairman of the Landscape Architecture Department and the Acting Director of the Urban Design Program.
While Pete was at the GSD for option studio final review, Geller and Sturla and other recipients of the Pete Walker Fellowship gathered with Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87, GSD faculty, and other distinguished guests at the Harvard University Faculty Club to celebrate this unique award.
Sophia Geller MLA ’17 working in the farm at the Château de Courances.
Sophia Geller is a 2017 graduate of the GSD’s MLA program; through her hands-on research, she gained an intimate understanding of the Château de Courances and furthered her understanding of the landscape architect’s role in historical sites with the desire to evolve. What drew her to Courances is its unique standing as a privately-owned historic site that is actively engaged in experimentation with sustainable farming and land management techniques. Her presentation “Devant le Chateau” translates to in front of or, before the chateau, a term inspired by a map Geller found in an old laundry house in the maintenance yard. This phrase became a mantra of sorts as she set out to gain an intimate understanding of the areas surrounding the chateau. Through the four seasons, she familiarized herself with the ways each of Courances’ landscapes is designed, used, managed, and maintained.
She shared the following sentiment as part of her presentation to Pete Walker and guests: “The Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship gave me the chance to live and work directly in the landscape I was studying. Never would I have developed such a deep and layered knowledge of place without the time and direct engagement that the fellowship afforded me, something all too often lost in standard landscape architecture pedagogy. These experiences, and the relationships and skills I have developed are fundamentally shaping my definition of what a landscape architect can and should do, just as I hope they will for many others to follow.”
Other GSD students now have the opportunity to follow her in footsteps at Courances. As part of her time as the Pete Walker and Partners Fellow, she developed the GSD-Courances Design Residency program, which allows for two MLA students each summer to be exposed to new modes of thought, discourse, and engagement on such topics as sustainable land management, agriculture, conservation, stories of place, and the role of historic sites in contemporary society.
Paola Sturla MLA ’11in Qatar.
Paola Sturla is the 2011 recipient of the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship and has returned to the GSD as the 2018-2019 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture. At the GSD, she teaches courses on artificial intelligence and landscape core, as well as serves as the Content Curator for the exhibition “Mountains and the Rise of Landscape” in the GSD’s Druker Design Gallery. She is a registered Architetto and Paesaggista in Italy and a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning, Design, and Policy at Politecnico di Milano. For Sturla, the Fellowship uniquely enabled her to frame her viewpoint on infrastructure and its grounding. Her presentation “Grounding the Flows: Exploring the Aesthetics of Infrastructure” considered her travels in China, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Qatar by looking at the question: how does technology influence the way we design? “I kept questioning what I was experiencing, asking myself what’s the agency of technology in designing such spaces,” she said. The Fellowship inspired her to begin her Ph.D., which investigates infrastructure, technology, artificial intelligence, and landscape.
Sturla is thankful for the Fellowship and its influence on her professional path. When reflecting on the Fellowship, she commented: “Thank you, Pete Walker, for this Fellowship, which has had an incredible impact on my career and my identity as a designer. It has been about having the strength, sense of appreciation, and self-esteem to keep framing my viewpoint on the world and the impact of our actions as humans and designers working at the intersection between the measurable and the experiential.”
The legacy of Pete Walker will endure through environments that he has built and enhanced, and through the example and opportunity that Pete Walker and Partners provides for the next generation of landscape architects via the Fellowship. For more information on the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship for Landscape Architecture, please visit the webpage.
Just beyond the old iron gates of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a creative experiment in pedagogy has been bringing the concept of plant sciences to growing, changing life.
For three years now, master’s degree candidates in “Field Methods and Living Collections,” led by Rosetta S. Elkin of the Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Arboretum’s William “Ned” Friedman, have used social theory and a methodology that examines plant evolution, morphology, built neighborhoods, and landscape design to address “plant blindness”—the human tendency to take plants for granted, reducing them to a green fuzz in the background.
“There is quite a history of human exceptionalism, and that we are the absolute species. On Maslow’s ladder [the hierarchy of needs] … plants were so low they barely made the rung. The whole class hinges on this diagnosis of plant blindness, that people assume that plants are just there, and they will always be there,” said Elkin, an associate professor of landscape architecture and faculty fellow at the Arboretum.
Penelope Phylactopoulos shows her group’s redwood installation to Joan Chen and Jimmy Pan
Yet, “We’re an entirely plant-dependent species. Plants were here way before we were; they will be here way after. They move, grow, communicate, behave, and adapt in magnificent ways and have a very different relationship with time. Once you start to appreciate that, the world around you does become a little more articulated,” she said.
Plants can be bellwethers of environmental risk, which often is overlooked by urbanists or architects focused on parcels of land whose confines are determined by economics or politics. High risk from and to the environment, such as drought, transcends manmade boundaries, however. This means that studying the effects of climate change requires acknowledging that where ecology is at risk, so is all of the area that the local environment defines, Elkin said.
Plants, as living, growing, slowly mobile lifeforms, are in both harmonious and conflictual existence with humans. It’s a complex dichotomy that is constantly shifting, said Friedman, the director of the Arnold Arboretum and Arnold professor of organismic and evolutionary biology. But the relationship goes beyond the barriers of our intentions—reducing plants to objects of food, or shade, or decorative beauty.
“One of the most important goals of the course is to break down the dangerous assumption that plants are an extension of the human condition—that we can relate to plants if we humanize them, make them seem like us or exist merely to serve us,” Friedman said. “The goal is for students to begin to meet plants on their terms and initiate a lifelong process of understanding these non-human living organisms through the repeated acts of observation and reflection. They are going to spend their professional lives doing things that involve the use of plants in design, but they don’t necessarily have a relationship with plants.”
Contributions directed to the GSD’s Community Service Fellowships have a multiplier effect in underserved communities: Current students receive funding to work with community organizations, federal and state agencies, and nonprofit institutions, assisting with design, research, or planning projects that the organizations ordinarily would not be able to access. Students who are awarded these fellowships earn $7,000 for 10-week internships in the United States and abroad, gain valuable work experience, and use their design education and training to help communities in need.
One example is the Lawrence and Marla Curtis Fund for Public Service, which provides support for summer internships with Massachusetts nonprofit or public sector organizations committed to affordable housing, historic preservation, neighborhood development, housing policy, and economic vitality. As president and managing partner of WinnDevelopment, Larry Curtis MAUD ’83 has devoted his career to the creation of affordable housing and historic rehabilitation developments. Marla Curtis, an accomplished architect who owns a private architectural and consulting firm, has focused on the design of affordable housing in historic buildings. Together, they have advocated for the built environment, homes for working families, and equality in Massachusetts and beyond. The GSD will select the first Curtis Fellow for the summer of 2019.
My education at GSD, and Marla’s education at Cornell Architecture, taught us the importance of the public-private process in designing buildings and cities. The public sector plays a critical role in the shaping of our urban environment. Our newly created Fund for Public Service will enable GSD students to work for public entities and gain an appreciation of this and further their career goals. ~Lawrence H. Curtis MAUD ’83 and Marla G. Curtis
The Wendy Evans Joseph MArch ’81 Community Service Fund supports summer fellowships at nonprofit or public sector organizations throughout the U.S. that work with underserved or economically disadvantaged communities. Wendy Evans Joseph is the founder of Studio Joseph in New York, which has completed a diverse array of public, institutional, and cultural projects. Her passion for art and museum culture and public education has led to the firm’s strong commitment to museum design and temporary and permanent exhibition installation.
One of the inaugural recipients of the Wendy Evans Joseph MArch ’81 Community Service Fund, Eric Moed MDes ’19, engaging with children at Boston’s Horizons for Homeless Children.
One of the first recipients of a fellowship from the Wendy Evans Joseph MArch ’81 Community Service Fund, Eric Moed MDes ’19, spent the summer of 2018 working with Boston’s Horizons for Homeless Children. During his 10-week internship, Moed helped with the design of a parents’ resource room, a private space outside of a homeless shelter where parents can relax and learn about resources and job opportunities. As part of his design and development work, he assisted in finding and vetting contractors, coordinated with the head design architect of the organization’s new building, and interviewed teachers, administrators, and parents about what they would like to see in the space. Moed also volunteered with toddlers and preschool children, helping them overcome individual frustrations and challenges and filling their days with play-based learning.
Other students with community service fellowships spent their summers working in local communities with organizations like the Boston Planning and Development Agency and the South Boston Neighborhood Development Corporation. Some worked in other domestic and international locations, including the municipality of Arganil, Portugal, and Jordanian refugee camps, where they worked with the Food Water Energy Consortium.
Ralph Johnson MArch ’73, Kathleen Nagle MArch ’87, and Melissa Kaish GSD ’85 at the Accomplished Ambition Campaign Celebration.
In its final year, the Grounded Visionaries campaign showed its global reach, most notably in the area of fellowships and financial aid. Thanks to the generosity of donors from all over the world, students from Canada, China, India, Israel, Palestine, and various Asian countries now have greater access to top-tier opportunities in design education and can learn alongside peers pursuing particular GSD programs.
Prior to the Campaign, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design had 38 endowed fellowships; today there are 63 endowed fellowships, marking a 60 percent increase in the number of endowed funds since the start of the Campaign. Of the 26 endowed fellowships established during the Campaign, 9 launched in fiscal year 2018. Those funds are:
The Grounded Visionaries Alumni Council Financial Aid Fund, supported by current and former Alumni Council members, with lead gifts from Geoffrey LePlastrier MArch ’75 and an anonymous donor. This fund is providing aid to students active in the GSD community.
The Moshe Safdie Fellowship Fund aids students from Israel or Palestine who are enrolled in the Master in Architecture, Master in Urban Planning, or Master of Architecture in Urban Planning programs
The Nagle-Johnson Family Fellowship established by Perkins+Will, Ralph Johnson MArch ’73, and Kathleen Nagle MArch ’87 provides financial aid to students attending the GSD with the aim of expanding prospects for underrepresented members of the GSD community.
The Richard Murphy Fellowship Fund, created by the MLA ’80 alumnus, supports students in the Master in Landscape Architecture II program.
The C Foundation Fellowship Fund provides financial aid with a preference for GSD students from China.
The Gennosuke Obata Fellowship Fund, funded by the Nipsea Management Company Pte Ltd, provides financial aid to GSD students from Asian countries.
The Horne Family Fellowship Fund established by Bridget Colman and Mark M. Colman AB ’83, MBA ’87. This Fund provides aid for students from Canada.
The Steven Plofker and Bobbi Brown Fellowship Fund, funded by Steven D. Plofker MCRP ’80 and his wife, provides aid for students enrolled in the Master in Urban Planning program.
The India Design Leadership Fund, established by Siddharth Yog MBA ’04, provides financial aid for students from India.
Moshe Safdie and Richard Murphy, Jr. MLA ’80 at the Accomplished Ambition Campaign Celebration.
The Irving Innovation Fellowship exemplifies many of the ideals at the heart of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design community. The John E. Irving Family kick-started the GSD’s Grounded Visionaries campaign in 2013 with the establishment the John E. Irving Dean’s Innovation Fund from which the Irving Innovation Fellowship was inspired.
Over the past three years, the Fellowship has enriched the design research of a diversity of GSD students, enabling recipients to continue following threads of research, inquiry, and innovation beyond their time as students, and offering a platform through which they can continue contributing to the School’s pedagogy and dialogue. A thesis or other capstone project often serves as the springboard for the Irving Innovation Fellowship. The Fellowship’s first recipient, Alex Timmer MArch ’16, engaged the Fellowship after his graduation to interrogate materiality, fabrication, and assembly technologies, and to help conceptualize and refine the trajectory of his post-GSD practice.
During the GSD’s inaugural Fellowship Reception in 2017, Timmer thanked the Irving family for the “time and resources to coalesce all of my opportunities into my own design and research practice,” and for the opportunity to “help students develop a methodology of making.”
This year, four recent GSD graduates are extending their research at the GSD and pursuing novel routes of research and discovery through the Irving Innovation Fellowship. Here’s a look at what they’re up to.
Ernest Haines MLA ’18: Turnpike Metabolism: Reconstituting National Infrastructure Through Landscape
Since receiving the Irving Innovation Fellowship in Spring 2018, Ernest Haines MLA ’18 has focused his recent work on three themes: expanding his prize-winning MLA thesis, “Turnpike Metabolism: Reconstituting National Infrastructure Through Landscape”; conducting computational experiments in vegetal morphology; and working on a comprehensive assessment and synthesis of digital tools and methods in service of design pedagogy. Haines’s work is girded by an emphasis throughout on sharing the knowledge he is uncovering.
Advised by Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Pietrusko MArch ’12, Haines and “Turnpike Metabolism” recall the importance of the highway within the field of landscape architecture, exploring the ways in which an active feedback loop between sense, design, construction, use, degradation, and replacement can redefine infrastructural metabolism both locally and nationally in the United States. Haines took on the U.S. interstate highway system as the site of inquiry; grounding the project in the Meadowlands in New Jersey, he proposes a set of standardized sections, located at specific typological conditions, which could be deployed nationally.
Central to this work, Haines observes, was the desire to allow the landscape to actively push back upon and define the way infrastructures are developed in the United States.
“Oftentimes, the frame of a school semester, and demands of a full course load, left unanswered a number of research questions I was interested in,” he says. “The Irving Innovation Fellowship has allowed me time and space to pursue those unanswered questions.”
Hence, Haines has been utilizing his Irving Innovation Fellowship to develop an agent-based computational model of woody plant growth. Pulling heavily from the concept of the “Urpflanze” described in Wolfgang Goete’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, Haines has been able to source many materials from a variety of disciplines, ranging from the conceptual models of Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, to the botanically driven models by Francis Halle, et al., in their work Tropical Trees and Forests: An Architectural Analysis.
Haines’s “computed plant” concept in action
Atop ongoing research, Haines has been actively submitting his work to journals, competitions, and other external venues. Most recently, he received the Student Award at the AIANY + ASLANY Transportation + Infrastructure Design Excellence Awards.
The Fellowship has also surfaced another avenue for sharing his knowledge—teaching.
Through his time as a fellow, Haines has collaborated with Pietrusko and Rosetta Elkin, associate professor of landscape architecture, within the Landscape Architecture Core III studio. In addition to offering desk crits and reviews, Haines has been developing and leading workshops that deal with digital tools and methodologies, exploring an interstitial space between GIS, 3-D modeling software, and animated media. He has also been working towards the translation of the digital tools used to represent students’ projects within the core pedagogic concerns and the theoretical underpinnings of the studio.
“While in school I was able to satisfy my interest in teaching through teaching assistant and tutor positions,” Haines notes. “However, as a fellow, I am able to embed myself and my research within the formation of core design studio pedagogy. This is something that I think is a rare and unique opportunity, and certainly not one I take for granted.”
Hyojin Kwon MArch ’18: Death, Divorce, Down-sizing, Dislocation, and (Now) Display: A Self-Storage Center for a More Exhibitionist Future
Hyojin Kwon MArch ’18 took up another form of well-used infrastructure—storage—for her Master in Architecture thesis “Death, Divorce, Down-sizing, Dislocation, and (Now) Display: A Self-Storage Center for a More Exhibitionist Future.” For her thesis, Kwon was advised by John May MArch ’02, director of the Master in Design Studies Program and assistant professor of architecture, and Andrew Witt MDes ’02, MArch ’07, assistant professor in practice of architecture.
With this thesis project, Kwon argues that, in a consumer culture where people increasingly identify with their possessions and keep amassing more and more things, the concept and typology of self-storage centers are ripe for reconsideration. Kwon gestures toward a new architectural typology for self-storage centers, blurring the distinctions between storage space, personal curation, and cultural display. Kwon’s storage centers would provide users with different storage types depending on need or desire to access or display possessions. The private can become public, and vice versa.
“Public exhibition of personal possessions achieves an institutional character for the self-storage center, in which objects gain an architectural importance,” Kwon observes. “Constant curation of objects resists hoarder culture, instead asking what belongs in storage when the previously dark and hidden becomes bright and showcased. This specific architecture does not subordinate its contents; rather, it provides a framework into which objects, people, and memories breathe life.”
If Kwon’s thesis offered a speculative proposal, then her continued research, made possible by the Irving Innovation Fellowship, is bringing into clarity the specific typologies and forms needed to realize these alternative storage systems.
In her Fellowship thus far, Kwon has engaged cutting-edge technology that enables reciprocal, three-dimensional, formal information exchange between physical objects to be stored and digitally-modeled environments. She is also using 3-D-scanning techniques to digitize storage items, and then implementing 3-D-printing techniques to explore strategies for the fabrication, materiality, and representation of her proposed typology. In order to further develop the unique architectural forms needed for this new form of self-storage center, the physical behavior of the objects is simulated through digital operations that include piling, stacking, draping, and packing, each of which is driven by software-based physics engines.
This consistent feedback between the operations of digitalization, simulation, and materialization processes will ultimately culminate in the development of prototypical architectural objects. Kwon hopes this research will result in a fabrication approach that can be scaled for implementation within architectural practice itself.
The time, the continued access to resources like the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library and Special Collections, and the open-ended nature of the Irving Innovation Fellowship have enabled Kwon to layer these fascinating and important observations atop her foundational thesis. And, like Haines, Kwon has appreciated the opportunity to integrate studio pedagogy with digital representation and fabrication, and to extend working relationships with faculty advisors and mentors.
“This Fellowship encourages research through design, which has made it possible for me to develop my body of work,” Kwon says. “Fellowships like this create a platform for academic and professional careers, and provide emerging scholars with the much-needed bridge between theory and practice.”
Youngjin Song MDes ’17: Flashback
Recent Master in Design Studies graduate Youngjin Song MDes ’17 collaborated with current MArch candidate Dohyun Lee MArch ’20 on Flashback, proposing a cylindrical screen-tower with internal cameras, intended for a public space or plaza (the project was a finalist in Seoul’s “TODAY: Public Art Installation Competition” for Seoul City Hall Plaza). Flashback video-records its surrounding scenery on a continuous basis while also looping the footage it gathered 12 hours prior, and, in turn, capturing viewers’ reactions to the looped video. In other words, visitors glimpse the activity that took place 12 hours ago where they are standing, at the exact solar opposite of the time at which they encounter the piece; at sunset, they view a recording of the preceding sunrise.
With Flashback (originally titled Someone in the Crowd), Song and Lee aim to awaken viewers to the shared and continuous nature of space, and the fact that the viewers themselves are part of this shared nature. They also explore the power, flexibility, and implications of archiving and technology. Flashback generates a literal archive of its surroundings, but also provokes uncertainty and viscerality, and perhaps evokes questions around surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the strengthening grip of technology. Song and Lee developed Flashback as an independent-study project.
The Irving Innovation Fellowship has enabled Song to continue this exploration. Song has focused on broadening the scope of the Master in Design Studies program’s Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) concentration, collaborating especially with the GSD’s Silvia Benedito MAUD ’04, associate professor of landscape architecture; Krzysztof Wodiczko, professor in residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain; and Malkit Shoshan, lecturer in urban planning and design—all of whom are co-area heads of the MDes program’s ADPD concentration.
“The Irving Innovation Fellowship has provided me with unique opportunities to work closely with GSD faculty and students,” Song says. “It has been meaningful for me to help both sides communicate effectively and to promote support between them.”
The Fellowship has also allowed Song the breathing room to deepen her design practice, with a focus on exploring how an artist can mediate between objects and the public. Among other activities, she recently launched a contemporary gallery for young artists, and is collaborating on an exhibition about memory.
“Flashback” designed by Youngjin Song MDes ’17 and MArch candidate Dohyun Lee MArch ’20.
Enrique Aureng Silva MDes ’18: disaster response in Mexico
Recent MDes graduate Enrique Aureng Silva’s MDes ’18 thesis proposed, through a reinterpretation of the concept of liminality, that earthquakes, and specifically the repetitive nature of earthquakes in Mexico, should be seen as an opportunity for change. He writes “change, in the interpretation of certain historical accounts, change of heritage discourses, change in the relation between historic preservation and historic buildings, and change in the structures of power that dictate the narratives associated with them.”
“All of these should be questioned in order to create new architectures, new urbanisms, and new social interactions that, while still reflecting on the past—on the physical and non-physical fragments left by the catastrophes—use the historic fabric not as a nostalgic element to lament loss, but as a starting point for where to imagine new alternatives,” Silva writes.
Through the Irving Innovation Fellowship, Silva has been working with Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, to follow threads of his thesis research in pursuit of novel, alternative responses to natural catastrophes, specifically alternatives to historic preservation. One area of focus is the 2017 earthquakes that affected southern Mexico.
Silva and Davis are working toward a synthesizing publication or exhibition, intended to be released in Spring 2019. The Fellowship has also afforded Silva the opportunity to collaborate on Fall 2018 option studio “The Agency of Mezcal in the Oaxaca Valley,” alongside professor Elisa Silva.
Looking Ahead
The Irving Innovation Fellowship has grown since its inception, and now empowers a handful of exceptional GSD students each year to extend their Harvard research beyond Commencement Day. The GSD looks forward to the program’s growing momentum and the continued work and impact of those projects it has empowered thus far.
Sol Camacho is an architect and urban designer who founded and directs RADDAR, an architecture firm based in São Paulo and Mexico City. RADDAR, which was recently awarded the Silver Lafarge Holcim Award in Latin America (2017), views research as design and design as research as complementary processes that feed into each other to keep their architectural and urban design practice proactive, innovative, and forward thinking. All projects, whether commissioned design, self-initiated research, grant applications, or competitions, focus on building a state of the art architectural practice engaged with cultural and social development in urban contexts. Recently Camacho co-curated Brazil’s official participation in the 2018 Venice Biennale. Selected by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, the exhibition, Muros de ar [Walls of Air], explores the relationship between material and immaterial spaces in Brazil.
Additionally, Camacho is the Cultural Director of the Instituto Bardi/Casa de Vidro Institution founded by Lina Bo and Pietro Bardi. In this role, she manages the Bardi’s archive and the cultural program of Casa de Vidro and has curated the international exhibition “Glass Houses,”“Lina’s Garden: An ongoing Landscape Construction”(2017) “The House as a Home,” and “Lina’s MASP 50 Years the building” (both 2018).
Among her professional recognitions, Camacho was selected as a candidate for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2016) and twice earned the FONCA research scholarship (2012, 2014). Before establishing RADDAR, she worked independently in an open-office format partnering with renowned architects in Mexico, US, and Brazil. She also worked at TEN Arquitectos, Skidmore Owings & Merill in New York, and Architecture-Studio in Paris.
Read this Q&A to learn more about the exhibition at the Venice Biennale, her development of the Summer Pavilion for Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House, her experience attending her tenth reunion at the GSD this Fall, and more.
1. Tell us about your background. Where were your born and what previous degrees do you have?
I was born and raised in Mexico City. My mother, an architect dedicated to conservation and heritage, raised me in the megalopolis between downtown, site visits, and museums. I studied for my Bachelor of Architecture degree at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, with an exchange of 18 months at Ecole d’Architecture Paris Val de Seine/Beaux Arts—my Paris years had a big influence on the steps I later took in going to New York, Boston, Chicago, and São Paulo.
2. What drew you to the GSD and the Master of Architecture in Urban Design program?
I always knew I wanted to do a Masters and continue my studies. When I was in New York working for Enrique Norten, I realized everyone in the office had a graduate degree, and the difference between them and my undergrad training was huge. A colleague of mine at the time who was a GSD alumnus, Mark Dwyer MAUD ’03, literally took me ‘by the hand’ one weekend to visit the GSD and said: “this is where you HAVE to study!” I applied and was accepted to both Columbia and Harvard. The Urban Design program at the GSD offered an understanding of Architecture from a perspective of the city and even broader, the territory. This aspect combined with the teachers at the GSD, and the possibility of crossing to other Harvard Schools and even MIT, drove my decision.
3. What is the most significant thing you learned while at the GSD?
(1) The broadness of the word Architecture (urban design, history, landscape, curatorial projects, conservation, etc.) (2) Professionalism and high standards in every level, from the understanding and analysis of the context, how to transform and translate that to design with drawings and models and tying all this to a coherent discourse in writing and presenting, and (3) Colleague students are also great teachers.
4. Thinking back to your time at Harvard, how did your experience as a Masters student at the Graduate School of Design influence your career as an architect and urban designer?
For me, graduate school at Harvard was a real “before and after” period in my life as a professional architect and also personally. Without the experience there, I would definitively not be where I am today. The impact is so big that it transforms for the better your way of thinking, processing, strategizing, connecting, creating and developing projects, relationships, and interests.
The level of professionalism (related to quality and timing) that we needed to execute the Pavilion for the Venice Biennale or the summer pavilion at Casa de Vidro are the perfect examples of a direct result of my education at Harvard. Also, equally important were the skills I acquired to execute the drawings and generate the content.
5. You attended your tenth Reunion at the GSD in October. What were the highlights of this experience? What value have you seen in engaging with the GSD alumni community?
The symposium PRACTICE: Outside In | Inside Out was the best moment of the weekend. We need to raise the importance of reunions. Ten years is a good moment to evaluate, reconnect, and rethink the learning experience acquired in school. Reunion should not only be about the nostalgia of seeing your friends and entering Gund Hall—which is great, but today we’re already quite connected by social media, emails, etc. Alumni should take the opportunity to connect with current students and talk about what each one has done and how students can benefit from real practice examples while alumni learn new ways of thinking and producing.
6. What about the GSD currently excites you? (Could be activities, events, research, lectures, etc.)
I am curious about the new building! Also the grants and fellowships (Wheelwright Prize, Richard Rogers Fellowship, Loeb Fellowship etc.), which are amazing ways that the GSD connects and supports active and talented individuals beyond its walls, bringing content, and continuous international interaction.
7. You founded the award-winning architecture firm RADDAR, based in São Paulo. Tell us a bit about the firm.
Today my office is in São Paulo, near Avenida Paulista. It is a small practice in terms of size, employees, and built work, but it is quite big in what we reach and impact and the different platforms and mediums to which we relate. The name RADDAR that goes after ‘research as design and design as research’ describes the approach I have to architecture.
Our work ranges from research projects, to curatorial endeavors, from object design to urban planning, and conservation projects as well as teaching, writing, and publishing.
As young architects in Latin American contexts, we face huge challenges building a portfolio of work in only one area. So the strategy has been multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary, and whether small or large, the projects always involve the city, the public sphere, promotion, and enhancement of the cultural scene.
8. Besides São Paulo, you also do a lot of work in Mexico City. What are a few of the common challenges that these two megacities share in terms of urban design?
Yes, I am from Mexico City (CDMX), and I do practice in both cities. I make a point in keeping a connection with Mexico City, whether through research or teaching and also smaller design projects. There are very few practitioners on both of these extremely similar cities. Both Mexicans and Brazilians often look for references in countries like the US or in Europe, which have a completely different social, political, and economic realities. I have been working on making connections between CDMX and São Paulo so that we can learn different approaches to similar problems in these Latin American megacities.
The main challenges they both face are their urban sprawl and the issues of water management, trash management, and mobility.
9. Congratulations on your role as one of the curators for the Brazilian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale 2018. Could you tell us a little about your experience at the Biennale?
Thank you! The Venice Biennale is very well known in the US but much less understood in Brazil as one of the most important events for the contemporary architectural scene. For a GSD audience, I don’t need to say that the discourse of each pavilion and the main exhibition are world-wide references for everyone to understand what architecture (practice and academia) is doing now, but for our commissioner and the wider audience in São Paulo and other cities in Brazil, this is little known.
As curators, we took advantage of the Biennale as a platform to open a dialogue with other curators, other disciplines, professionals all over Brazil on the most pressing issues of each country’s built environment.
The exhibition organized together with three colleagues, Marcelo Maia Rosa, Gabriel Kozlowski, and Laura González, had the clear target to address key issues of Brazilians cities and the territory at large, widening the conversation of the architectural building.
“WALLS OF AIR” was how we named the exhibition. It was our answer to FREESPACE =, the main theme proposed by the general curators of the Biennale.
WALLS OF AIR in many ways was an unprecedented exhibition project showing new content specifically produced for Venice. We showed ten enormous cartographies of 3m x 3m depicting research done around ten big themes related to urbanization in Brazil. We also showcased 17 amazing projects to explain the argument of WALLS OF AIR—in each one of them there is a kind of answer from an architect to the different walls (real or conceptual) that as professionals we encounter while building in Brazil. The 17 projects were the result of a selection from the first ever open call to architects in the country. This was a very rich and exciting process.
Camacho with the poster for “SAO PAULO: A RADICAL EVOLUTION” Symposium.
The whole process from the first meeting, to the brainstorming, development, and production of the Pavilion was a thrilling and unforgettable learning experience! We are now working on showing it in other places (maybe Boston!).
10. You’re one of the co-conveners of the “SAO PAULO: A RADICAL EVOLUTION” Symposium took place on November 27th at Insper. How did the project come about?
In early 2017, Felipe Correa MAUD ’03, who was my teacher at the GSD, organized the option studio “São Paulo: the Rescaling of Rail Infrastructure and New Models of Domestic Life.” Since the beginning, we talked about how this studio could be more than a semester of a student’s work and become a larger study (like he had previously done for Mexico City). Students came, and that was the kickstart of the project that later became a book edited by him, I wrote an essay in the book and participated in the research on the Urban Plan and Visions Chapter. The idea of the symposium was to have an event with contents, something beyond a book launch cocktail—it was the perfect occasion to have a discussion with the collaborators of the research and an opportunity to bring to Brazil international voices facing similar challenges. The symposium took place at INSPER, which is an engineering and business school, and the presentations drew a wide local audience. It was a full day of an extremely rich conversation with innovative practitioners on housing, urban growth, and its possibilities seen from diverse perspectives.
11. What advice do you have for GSD students and/or alumni?
For students: it is important to know that you’ll ‘digest’ what you’re learning way after you’re out of school; you’ll make the connections when you’re challenged with a project, a team, an idea.
For alumni: to communicate to the GSD what each one is doing, nothing better than seeing and learning from other’s experience.
12. What are you working on today?
Saturday, December 1 was the opening of the “Pavilhão de Verão” (Summer Pavilion) for Casa de Vidro (Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House), which I designed. As Cultural Director, I am in charge of the programming and curating of the contents of exhibitions and events in the House. The pavilion, which will remain from December 1st through March 21st, is a temporary space built to activate the Instituto Bardi with events during the summer. The majestic garden that Lina planted surrounds the House and is the perfect setting for concerts, courses, talks, and relaxing and enjoying a public space in São Paulo. The initiative of building it was accepted by the board when I proposed it as a more sustainable idea to a fundraising party that was being organized. The pavilion can be installed and uninstalled on an annual basis since it is built out of CLT wood, with only screws and nails used for its construction. It also allows for an effort to be multiplied, instead of a single event, the institute can raise money during the three warm months. The amoeba shape of the platform and roof was the result of respecting the existing trees. The opening on Saturday was a huge success having Maria Bethania, a local celebrity that knew Lina when she lived in Bahia with all the Tropicalia movement and the intellectual, creative musicians that gathered in the 60s and 70s. It was a blast! Now there is an effort to program the rest of the summer.
“Pavilhão de Verão” (Summer Pavilion) for Casa de Vidro. Photo credit: Leonardo Finotti.
I am also working on finalizing a book Glass Houses, which compares the Farnsworth, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the Eames House with Lina and Pietro’s house. This book is the result of an exhibition curated last year and symposium I organized with Renato Anelli bringing the directors of the houses to discuss the history and future of these iconic structures, from their domestic life to their present institutional vocation.
Also, I am working on research on the Copan Building, which is an ongoing project since 2016. It has had its stops due to other projects, but I’m hoping to publish it in 2019!
13. Tell us about your work/life balance? What occupies you when you are not working?
I have never seen a difference between life and work. I have different spaces (on the same block!) with my studio and our apartment, but there is no such thing as black and white…life flows between them. When I’m at work, either designing, writing, or team meetings, I am focused on making things happen. I share my studio with my husband and my children who come to our office and constantly come with me to other workplaces. When I am not working, I visit art galleries, exhibitions, and bookshops. As I walk the city, the windows of buildings make me imagine peoples’ lives. I love to watch dance (contemporary or classic) and cooking. I opened a restaurant in 2015! I never would’ve thought of connecting urbanism and cooking; it was born as a project to reactivate the COPAN building’s ground floor in downtown São Paulo.
14. What would surprise us about you?
It was not until recently that I understood how strongly my family has influenced my career. For me, it was simply just my family. Now I see how my passions, such as directing Casa de Vidro and the work at my office designing projects related to culture and city, do not come “out of the blue.” My paternal great-grandfather was the commissioner of Spain for the 1936 Paris World Expo, and he commissioned Josep Lluís Sert the pavilion where Picasso painted the Guernica. My maternal grandfather founded the most important museum in Mexico Museo de Antropología amongst many other achievements in building site museums, protecting important parts of the historical city. My mother is a strong voice in the preservation of Mexico’s architectural heritage where, besides designing, she is the local president of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). All this surprises me only now! I am surprised how education and example are so important, and the responsibility to continue is big. I guess I really understood this since I had Alex (3 yrs) and Leo (10 months).
An ambitious retrofit of a pre-1940s building on Harvard’s campus into a living laboratory and energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency has opened its doors. HouseZero is intended to address one of the biggest energy problems in the world today—inefficient existing buildings. Its design was driven by the goals of nearly zero energy for heating and cooling, zero electric lighting during the day, operating with 100 percent natural ventilation, and producing zero carbon emissions. The building is intended to produce more energy over its lifetime than was used to renovate it and throughout its subsequent operation.
Leveraging the renovated building as both a workspace and a research tool, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) will use millions of data points from hundreds of sensors to continually monitor its performance. This data will fuel research involving computational simulation, helping the center develop new systems and data-driven learning algorithms that promote energy-efficiency, health, and sustainability.
“HouseZero’s flexible, data-driven infrastructure will allow us to conduct further research that demystifies building behavior, and design the next generation of ultra-efficient structures,” said Ali Malkawi, founding director of CGBC and the creator and leader of the HouseZero project.
The new space will also be used to research how to fundamentally redefine how a structure can connect with and respond to its natural environment to promote efficiency and health. Rather than approaching the building as a “sealed box,” the building envelope and materials of HouseZero were designed to interact with the seasons and the exterior environment in a more natural way. The building will adjust itself constantly — sometimes by the minute — to reach thermal comfort for its occupants.
“HouseZero challenged us to rethink the conventions of building design and operation to enhance lifelong efficiency and quality of life for occupants,” said Malkawi.
Visit the Harvard Gazette to read the full article.
“Your support of the School is vital to the education and inspiration of future designers, to attracting premier faculty and staff, and to creating the foundation for this far-reaching impact.”
—Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design
The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) educates leaders in design, research, and scholarship to make a resilient, just, and beautiful world. The School takes a unique approach to design education: expanding the boundaries of imagination while focusing on how our projects give to the world around us.
To solve pressing issues at home and across the globe—social justice, climate change, urbanism, and more—the GSD needs to attract and educate talented and dedicated students. To empower those students in their pursuits to change the world, the GSD needs your support.
Your donation to the GSD works immediately to help students study the design solutions for global challenges facing society. Thanks to your essential contributions, the School can invest in the world’s next generation of designers as they explore, analyze, and confront these urgent issues.
Climate Change
After the Storm: Restructuring an Island Ecosystem: This spring 2018 option studio researched and addressed crucial design topics in the Caribbean Islands in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, cataclysmic events caused by climate change. The course included a site visit to the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to join the rebuilding effort and gain hands-on experience.
Resilience for the Boston Harbor Islands: Given the increasing risk of coastal storms and the rising demand for coastal habitats and recreation in Metro Boston, the Boston Harbor Islands are more important to the region than ever before. The Department of Landscape Architecture is exploring the topic of resilience through core studio investigations and a collaborative design charrette and conference.
Equity in the American City
Multiple Miamis Option Studio: Infrastructure, Affordability, Identity + the Public: Miami’s Overtown neighborhood has experienced public and private disinvestment, police surveillance, and mass incarceration as the rest of the city has transitioned into a hub for capital, innovation, and tourism. This fall 2018 studio uses Overtown as an urban innovation lab to explore Miami’s future as an American city, reckoning with its past and building a vision for its future.
Urban Disobedience: 99 Provocations to Disrupt Injustice in St. Louis: St. Louis faces several challenges: a legacy of discriminatory laws, urban disinvestment, the decline of the industrial economy, and tension between residents and law enforcement. This spring 2018 studio examined events that created the conditions of injustice and named 99 problems that impede redevelopment and social justice. Students then designed a catalog of 99 interventions to eradicate divides, correct inequalities, and advance innovation and justice.
Global Focus
KOREA REMADE: Alternate Nature, DMZ, and Hinterlands: This spring 2018 studio advanced alternative futures for a reunified Korean Peninsula through the concerns of ecology, technology, and design. Students studied the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries—currently the most dangerous and heavily fortified territory in the world—and advanced landscape site designs proposed.
Manila: Future Habitations: Manila’s extraordinary history has created extremes and tensions, and this city of 25 million experiences poverty and affluence, congestion and release, pollution and ecological diversity. This spring 2018 studio focused on three strategic areas within or adjacent to Manila’s historic core. Students used these sites to explore the effects of sea level rise, the connective tissue and common ground of cities, and more.
Your gift to the GSD Fund provides designers of the future with the opportunity to freely imagine and create in an environment that encourages excellence.
theme matches the upcoming MDE publication, Mobility (academic year ’18-’19), which includes illustration/comic elements. Please see below for further updates.
A graduate of Notre Dame, Griffin practiced architecture and gradually moved into urban planning and design over a ten-year career in S.O.M.’s Chicago office. After a Loeb Fellowship in urban planning and design at Harvard, she held a series of urban planning and design positions on the East Coast: Vice President of Planning for the Upper Manhattan Development Zone; Deputy Director of the D.C. Office of Planning; and Director of Community Development for the City of Newark, New Jersey. These provided additional material for her developing approach.
The combination of the Just City Index and A Pattern Language leads to expectedly principled-yet-amorphous patterns at a variety of scales. In a studio of twelve students, each one is responsible for producing four or five patterns. Greenberg’s are exemplary for their variety. She documents “a pattern of school vacancy which looked at closings of public schools from 2006 through 2012 and noting that nearly 70% of public schools in majority-black neighborhoods were closed, versus 20% in majority-white neighborhoods. There is still a large number of schools that remain vacant, especially in black communities, and the ones that have been redeveloped tend to be targeted for luxury condos, and don’t replicate the public good that a public school creates.”
