News

The GSD announces new faculty appointments in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and administration

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the following new appointments in the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning:
Bradley Cantrell (GSD MLA ‘03) appointed Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture. Cantrell’s work as a landscape architect and scholar, focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. He is currently serving as the 2013–14 recipient of the Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and as Director and Associate Professor at Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture. His research and teaching focuses on digital film, simulation, and modeling techniques to represent landscape form, process, and phenomenology. Cantrell’s expertise in digital representation ranges from improving the workflow of digital media in the design process to providing a methodology for deconstructing landscape through compositing and film editing techniques. In collaboration with Justine Holzman, Cantrell is the coauthor of the forthcoming, Responsive Landscapes (2015), which focuses on a range of case studies in architecture, landscape architecture, computer science, and art that employ responsive technologies as mediators of landscape processes. 
Rosetta S. Elkin appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture. Elkin is currently Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the GSD and was formerly the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture. Focusing on the expanded scale of vegetative technologies, Elkin’s research considers the role of plants from innovative seed mechanics to supra-terrestrial bionetworks. Her current research looks at the historical and geopolitical practice of specifying live matter as a solution to complex urban and rural issues. Most recently, Elkin has been leading a GSD research team that is studying state-scale ecological transformation in Rhode Island, as part of a research grant with the Rockefeller Foundation. She is currently designing and curating a forthcoming exhibition (Spring 2015) at Harvard’s Byerly Gallery, with the support of the Radcliffe Institute. The exhibit and publication will be developed around Elkin’s research on plant morphology. Elkin is also the principal of rse-landscape, a design studio in the Netherlands.  
Michael Hooper appointed Associate Professor of Urban Planning. Hooper has been Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD since 2010. Previously, he worked with the United Nations Development Program, including a year posted to the Kenya Ministry of Planning in Nairobi. He has also served as a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and is a member of MIT’s Displacement Research and Action Network. He currently serves as a member of the United Nations Technical Advisory Committee for the UN Equator Prize. At the GSD, Hooper leads the Urban Planning and Design thesis program and serves as Director of the Social Agency Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that studies the ways in which individuals, institutions, and organizations shape social outcomes in cities. Hooper’s research focuses on the politics of land use, housing and urbanization, with particular interest in the dynamics of eviction and displacement in participatory planning and governance and in urban dimensions of international development. He currently works on projects related to forced evictions and involuntary resettlement in East Africa, the politics of post-disaster reconstruction in Haiti, the management of urban informality in Mongolia, aboriginal housing policy in Canada, and the influence of perceptual biases on urban decision making. 
Kiel Moe (GSD MDes, ’03) appointed Associate Professor of Architecture and Energy. Moe has been Assistant Professor of Architectural Technology at the GSD since 2011. He also serves as co-director of the MDes program, coordinator of the Energy & Environments MDes concentration, and director of the Energy, Environments, and Design research lab at the GSD. Focusing on an architectural agenda for energy that is ecologically and architecturally ambitious, Moe’s research and pedagogy analyzes buildings as manifestations of large scale energy systems, and examines overlooked and discrete thermal parameters in buildings that have great impact on the power and thermodynamic depth of architecture. Recent projects include solid wood buildings in Colorado and southern Vermont, a masonry building letterpress studio in Maine, a loft renovation in Somerville, and an exhibit installation in Boston. Moe is author and editor of multiple books, including Insulating Modernism (2014), Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy (2013), and Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture (2010), among others. 
Robert Gerard Pietrusko (GSD MArch, ‘12) appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Pietrusko is currently serving as a Lecturer of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design at the GSD. He is also a co-founder of the metaLAB at Harvard where he develops data-rich tools and environments for the communication of scholarly work. He previously worked as a designer with Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York, and has held research positions at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping at the New School and at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab. Pietrusko’s research focuses on geographic representation and simulation, critical cartographic practices, and the study of spatial taxonomies. 
Andrew Witt (GSD MArch, ’07, MDes, ’02) appointed Assistant Professor in Practice in Architecture. Witt is currently Lecturer in Architecture and the co-founder of the Design Geometry Lab, where he collaborates with manufacturers, software developers, and cultural institutions to research the mathematics of morphology, including the generative, historical, and industrial implications of geometry on architecture. He previously served as Director of Research at Gehry Technologies (GT). Trained as both an architect and mathematician, Witt has particular interests in technically synthetic and logically rigorous approaches to form. His recently released book, Light Harmonies: The Rhythmic Photographs of Heinrich Heidersberger (2014) documents an ongoing historical project to excavate the epistemic underpinnings of digital design in the productive exchanges between mathematics, machinery, and architecture in the late 19th and 20th centuries. 
Additionally, five significant appointments have been made in faculty administration:
Grace La appointed Director of the Master in Architecture Program. La is Professor of Architecture, chair of the practice platform, and coordinator of the second semester architecture core program in which she teaches design studio. She is also Principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering, and landscape.
Ali Malkawi appointed Founding Director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities. Malkawi is Professor of Architectural Technology, a scholar, and expert in building simulation, energy conservation, and sustainability in buildings. As Founding Director of the Center, he and his team seek to transform the building industry through a commitment to design-centric strategy that directly links research outcomes to the development of new processes, systems, and products.
Mark Mulligan appointed Interim Curator of the Loeb Fellowship, 2014–2015. Mulligan is Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture and former Director of the Master in Architecture Program. He has taught a variety of studios and courses at the GSD including a course on modern Japanese architecture, introductory and advanced courses on construction technology, architecture studios, and urban design studios. 
Erika Naginski appointed Director of Doctoral Programs. Naginski is Professor of Architectural History and former Co-Chair of the Doctoral Programs. She teaches seminars and lectures in architectural history and theory. In this role, she will oversee the School’s doctoral programs’ admissions, advising, events, and curriculum, as well as help guide doctoral research. 
Antoine Picon appointed Director of Research. Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and formerly Co-Chair of the Doctoral Programs. In this role, he will promote and coordinate the School’s research efforts.