CONTACT

Brooke Lynn King
Event Coordinator
Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.496.2414

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GSD Calendar

Untitled Document Images from past GSD events

Ongoing

    • Platform GSD 09

      The Graduate School of Design is the site of many research-based conjectures and experiments. In core and options studios, seminars, independent study, and thesis work, students and faculty expand the literal, figurative, and virtual boundaries of design. Despite our diverse disciplinary affiliations, the work of the school also strives to be collaborative and insistently cross-disciplinary, for only in this way can we make significant and innovative contributions to creating a better world.

      Our intention is to explore the productive space between disciplinary advancement and cultural and social aspirations. We believe in the role of design as a form of constructed imagination that incorporates an ethical and political dimension. This engaged character of work provides a voice--a participatory and perceptual presence--to our design efforts. In this process, the advances in research and scholarship of the disciplines are informed by a much wider and more complex set of influences.

      For more information visit: Further description on the Current Exhibitions page

      For event details contact: Shannon Stecher (sstecher@gsd.harvard.edu)

      Through 12/20/2009   Gund Hall Gallery

    • Luminosity I

      Photography exhibition by Richard B. Peiser,
      Michael D.Spear Professor of Real Estate Development

      Curated by John R. Stilgoe,
      Robert & Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Harvard University

      Produced by Douglas Cogger

      For event details contact: Richard Peiser (rpeiser@gsd.harvard.edu)

      Through 11/29/2009   Gund Hall Gallery

Upcoming

  • November 16, 2009

    • Frances Loeb Library Semi-Annual Book Sale

      The library will be holding its semi-annual BOOK SALE. Arrive early for the best selection!

      For more information visit: Frances Loeb Library

      For event details contact: Sarah Dickinson (sdickinson@gsd.harvard.edu)

        9:00am 11/16/2009 - 9:00pm 11/17/2009 ·   Frances Loeb Library

    • Luminosity I: Artist's Reception for photography exhibition

      Photography exhibition by Richard B. Peiser,
      Michael D.Spear Professor of Real Estate Development

      Curated by John R. Stilgoe,
      Robert & Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Harvard University

      Credits: Douglas Cogger. Coordinator, Jung Min Hong and Dan Borelli

      On display in the Gund Hall Lobby, November 11 - November 29, 2009

      For event details contact: Richard Peiser (rpeiser@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:00pm - 7:30pm ·   Lobby/Rm 110 (Pit)
  • November 17, 2009

    • Frances Loeb Library Semi-Annual Book Sale

      The library will be holding its semi-annual BOOK SALE. Arrive early for the best selection!

      For more information visit: Frances Loeb Library

      For event details contact: Sarah Dickinson (sdickinson@gsd.harvard.edu)

        9:00am 11/16/2009 - 9:00pm 11/17/2009 ·   Frances Loeb Library

    • The Return of Nature: The Sublime Plan

      THE HARVARD GSD SYMPOSIA ON ARCHITECTURE
      Co-Conveners: Preston Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski

      The Return of Nature is the first of four Harvard GSD Symposia on Architecture, an annual series of events which brings together architects, historians and theorists to consider the question of architecture's autonomy in relation to contemporary debates.

      The Return of Nature: The Sublime Plan
      Participants:

      Barry Bergdoll is Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA. Author of such books as European Architecture 1750-1890 (2000) and Leon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (1994), his exhibitions include Mies in Berlin (2001) and the forthcoming Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity.

      K. Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the GSD, where he is Co-Director of Doctoral Programs (PhD and DDes). His books include the forthcoming Architecture's Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde and Sanctuaries, the Last Works of John Hejduk (2002). In 2008, he co-curated with Dana Miller Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe at the Whitney Museum.

      Diane Lewis, Professor of Design at the Cooper Union School of Architecture and Rome Prize recipient, founded Diane Lewis Architect in 1982. Her work is internationally recognized, and includes commissions for the New York Studio School, the NYU School of Law and Givenchy. Diane Lewis: Inside-Out Architecture New York City was published in 2006.

      For more information visit: Full description of Return of Nature series (pdf)

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:30pm - 8:00pm ·   Piper Auditorium
  • November 18, 2009

    • Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Niall Kirkwood, "MUMBAI elegy? matters of design in an arduous landscape"

      Niall G. Kirkwood
      Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology, GSD

      Perched on the sea and yet anchored to the soil of the Indian Continent, fabulously rich yet achingly poor, a historic trading seaport and now a modern global corporate center as well as home to multiple local street micro-enterprises, grossly overcrowded with social fragmentation and yet tolerant of the multiplicity of diverse ethnic backgrounds and religions, with a core of civic landscapes and heritage buildings yet overwhelmed with an overburdened infrastructure - sewers, water supply, roads and railways and proliferated with slums on marginal lands, the City of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) still holds sway as India's industrial and financial capital- one that is geographically rich, ecologically adaptive, creative, industrious, stressed- a dense complex unsanitary urban land set in a sultry environment, drenched by the monsoon rains and currently in economic and cultural flux with dizzying promise and turbocharged ambition.

      MUMBAI elegy? pays homage to the City of Mumbai, in this recent period of social flux, terrorist attacks, overtaxed populations and economic ascendancy. As one of India's densest and most grossly inhospitable urban environments Mumbai's demise has been forecast on a regular basis yet it continues to exist (and even thrive in certain cases) as a civic locale of shifting ecologies, economies and design experimentation combining past and present, dreams and reality.

      Niall G. Kirkwood is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Design School. His recent teaching and research on Mumbai and India includes option design studios- GSD 1402 Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai: Repositioning the Cotton Textile Mill Lands, Girangaon, Central Mumbai, (Fall 2006), GSD 1402 Mumbai Margins: Rethinking the Island City, (Fall 2007), GSD 1401 Mumbai Metropolitan: Adapting the Township Lands (Fall 2008), and research seminars - GSD 9206 Reimagining India: A New Urban Enterprise? (Spring 2009) and GSD 9206 Mumbai Matter: assembling urban India (Fall 2009).

      For more information visit: Niall Kirkwood GSD faculty profile

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:30pm - 7:30pm ·   Piper Auditorium
  • November 19, 2009

    • Responsive Environments Technology Lecture Series: Michelle Addington, "Material Progeny"

      "Smart materials" and highly advanced technologies have emerged in high visibility projects, elaborate installation designs, and any construction with an "intelligent" component in which they are showcased as a demonstration
      of the possibilities offered by implementing technologies and materials from distinctly different fields and applications. This "borrowing" of materials is profoundly different from our traditional use of materials in
      architecture. Our conventional building materials and systems have steadily evolved over centuries such that knowledge derived from experience continues to serve as our guide for application. These new materials and technologies, however, are products from other fields and disciplines altogether, in which we, as designers, possess neither experience nor the fundamental knowledge. As a result, we try to insert them as components into our static and unwieldy building systems. But they are a revolutionary shift away from our normative practice, and the pattern for technology transfer must be redevised. How can we begin to exploit the true potentials of these materials which are everything that our current technologies are not?

      Michelle Addington, Associate Professor of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture, is educated as both an architect and engineer whose teaching and research explore energy systems, advanced materials and new technologies. Building on her dissertation research on the discrete control of boundary layer heat transfer using micro-machines, she has extended her work to defining the strategic relationships between the differing scales of energy phenomena and the possible actions from the domain of building construction. Her articles and chapters on energy, system design, HVAC, lighting and advanced materials have appeared in several journals, books and reference volumes, and she has recently co-authored a book on Smart Materials and Technologies for Architecture. Before coming to Yale, Addington taught at Harvard University for ten years, and was an engineer and manager at Dupont and at NASA. She received her D.Des and MDesS from Harvard University, B.Arch from Temple University and BSME from Tulane University.

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        12:00pm - 2:00pm ·   Rm 112 (Stubbins)

    • Thomas Shipley, "The Unitization of space and time: Segmentation and recognition of objects and events"

      Abstract
      The talk will consider how and why humans group objects and events in space and time. Unitization, the grouping of objects and events, may be fundamental to human thinking, allowing us to engage in adaptive future-oriented behavior. Generally objects and events are grouped in such a way that a space and actions within it are predictable. Boundaries between objects and events are seen at local regions of unpredictability. The first part of the talk will review work in a variety of areas in psychology on what is know about object and event unitization. The latter part of the talk will be more speculative, considering how the spaces we live in influence how we subdivide and unitize those spaces, and how our activities and the predictability of others' actions influence these processes. Implications for design of space and information services, including pushing just-in-time information will be discussed.

      Biography
      Thomas F. Shipley is an associate professor of Psychology at Temple University. His research interests include object and event perception, spatial reasoning and STEM learning. Shipley has worked on the role of dynamics and learning in object recognition and detection using biological motion displays and the interaction of perception and action in adults. Shipley has developed a model of object perception that involves linking the visible pieces of a partially occluded form, including specifying the rules governing 3D interpolation of hidden edges, and investigations of how spatial boundary information may be observed and filled in over time. Shipley has expanded on his work on unit formation over time to include event recognition and segmentation, developing a model of event segmentation, which is based on geometrical models of object segmentation. He has published an edited book on event processing with Jeff Zacks. His recent work focuses on understanding visualization, in navigation, mental rotation, and the development of expertise in complex spatial visualization in the geosciences.

      For event details contact: Dido Tsigaridi (dtsigari@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:30pm - 7:30pm ·   Portico 123

    • Film Screening: "Dark Days" Directed by Marc Singer

      Description: In the pitch black of the tunnel, rats swarm through piles of garbage as high-speed trains leaving Penn Station tear through the darkness. For some of those who have gone underground, it has been home for as long as twenty-five years. Dark Days is an eye-opening experience that shatters the myths of homelessness by revealing a thriving community living in tunnels beneath New York City and honestly capturing their resilience and strength in their struggle to survive.

      Winner: Audience Award, Freedom of Expression Award, Cinematography Award (Sundance 2000 Film Festival), Best Documentary Award (L.A. Film Critics Association), Best Documentary Award (Indie Spirit)

      Sponsored by HousingGSD.

      For event details contact: Ivan Levi (ilevi@gsd.harvard.edu)

        7:30pm - 9:30pm ·   Rm 517
  • November 20, 2009

    • Landscape Lunchbox Series: Bridget Baines, "GROSS.MAX.: Recent Works"

      Bridget Baines founded GROSS. MAX. Landscape Architects with Eelco Hooftman in 1996. GROSS. MAX was awarded the 2006 European Landscape Award for, according to the jury, their individual design concepts and major part in shaping the style of landscape architecture in the early 21st century. The practice has won numerous competitions and awards for public space and has an international portfolio of exciting and challenging projects. GROSS. MAX's first collaborative work in 1996 was an award winning scheme for two parks at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, soon followed by a winning entry for the landscape masterplan for Hannover Expo 2000. Since the completion of Whiteinch Square as part of Glasgow '99 City of Architecture and Design and the first prize in the RIBA competition for Hackney Town Hall Square the practice has been recognised for its contextual approach with a contemporary idiom towards urban space. Recently GROSS. MAX added numerous competition winning designs for public squares in London alone and abroad won numerous competitions with Zaha Hadid Architects. Bridget Baines has been guest lecturer in many cities including Copenhagen, Yamaguchi, Paris and Vancouver.

      A light lunch will be served.

      For more information visit: GROSS. MAX.

      For event details contact: Vanessa Cheung (vcheung@gsd.harvard.edu)

        12:00pm - 1:00pm ·   Rm 508

    • GSD PhD Talks: Meenu Tewari, "Growth in the face of Instability: Exploring the historical geography of resilient regions"

      Using the evolution of my work - from dissertation to now - as a lens, I will focus on questions of methodology in framing theory-driven case study research, field work challenges, and moving from analysis toward publication and beyond. Methodologically I will focus on grounded political economy, historical institutionalism and historical geography, as well as reflect on the merits and challenges of following a case longitudinally over time. Substantively, the talk will explore issues of growth under uncertainty, specifically analyzing dynamic growth among small, interdependent engineering firms in a prosperous agrarian state, and the institutional underpinnings of their resilience.

      Meenu Tewari is Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. She is interested in the political economy of development, local industrialization, skill formation and upgrading within regional production networks in developed and developing countries. Her work focuses on ethnographic and institutional understandings of how the role of the state, the organization of work and processes of local economic development are being re-shaped in this era of globalization and economic integration. Her research has been published in World Development, Competition and Change, Environment and Planning A, Oxford Development Studies and Global Economy Journal. Her latest article is, "Footloose Capital, Intermediation and the Search for the 'High Road' in Low wage Industries," forthcoming in Labour in Global Production Networks edited by Anne Posthuma et. al., Oxford University Press, New Delhi and Oxford. She has served as a consultant for the World Bank, Inter American Development Bank, UNIDO and the Asian Development Bank. She received her Ph.D in Economic Development from DUSP, MIT.

      For event details contact: Sai Balakrishnan (sbalakr@fas.harvard.edu)

        12:00pm - 2:00pm ·   Rm 112 (Stubbins)

    • Rodrigo Perez de Arce, "Doing Nothing: Play, Leisure & Urban Place"

      Although essentially useless and unproductive, play has been prolific in generating urban settings. Play modes in Chile - as elsewhere - have embraced both vernacular and imported traditions, notably the Anglosaxon model and spirit of "sport". The presentation will focus upon certain patterns and environments for play and leisure as seen in the southern hemisphere.

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        12:00pm - 1:00pm ·   Rm 318

    • New Geographies #2 Book Launch: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY

      Roundtable Discussion Followed by a Reception
      Organized by Rania Ghosn, Editor-in-Chief

      -Martin Felsen, IIT/Archeworks
      -Mark Jarzombek, Architecture, MIT
      -Sheila Jasanoff, Science and Technology Studies, Harvard
      -Ajantha Subramanian, Anthropology, Harvard
      Moderated by Hashim Sarkis, GSD, Harvard

      Copies of the journal will be available for sale at the event.

      - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
      NEW GEOGRAPHIES #2: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY
      Energy infrastructures deploy space at a large scale, yet they remain invisible because the creation of value in the oil regime has long externalized spatial costs, sliding them out of sight and away from design's agency. Contemporary environmental, political, and financial crises have brought energy once again to the forefront of design concerns. Rarely, however, do practices of sustainable design--efficient building skins, islands of self-sufficiency, positive-energy machine--address the spatiality of energy systems. Instead, they tend to emphasize a renewable/nonrenewable binary that associates environmental costs exclusively with the infrastructure of oil and overlooks the geographic imperative of all forms of energy.

      Volume 2 of New Geographies proposes to historicize and materialize the relations of energy and space, and map some of the physical, social, and representational geographies of oil, in particular. By making visible this infrastructure, Landscapes of Energy is an invitation to articulate design's environmental agency and its appropriate scales of intervention.

      Contributors to New Geographies #2 include: Ivan Illich, John May, Carola Hein, Gavin Bridge, Abdellatif Benachenhou, El Hadi Jazairy, Santiago del Hierro, Gary Leggett, Andrew Barry, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Geoffrey Thun, Kathy Velikov, Martin Melosi, Maria Kaika, Geoff Manaugh, Pierre Belanger, Kazys Varnelis, Robert Sumrell, Jean Robert, and Mirko Zardini.

      - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
      New Geographies #2: LANDSCAPES OF ENERGY
      Editor-in-Chief: Rania Ghosn.
      Editorial Board: Gareth Doherty, El Hadi Jazairy, Stephen Ramos, Antonio Petrov, Neyran Turan.
      Advisory Board: Bruno Latour, Mohsen Mostafavi, Antoine Picon, Hashim Sarkis, Charles Waldheim.
      Editorial Advisor: Melissa Vaughn
      Graphic Design: Tomas Celizna and Daniel Harding.
      New Geographies is distributed by Harvard University Press.

      For more information visit: New Geographies website
        or: Cover of New Geographies Volume 2

      For event details contact: Rania Ghosn (rghosn@gsd.harvard.edu)

        5:00pm - 6:30pm ·   Piper Auditorium

    • landGSD Film Screening: "Manufactured Landscapes"

      Description from Edward Burtynsky's website:

      MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of 'manufactured landscapes' -- quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization's materials and debris, but in a way people describe as "stunning" or "beautiful," and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

      The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai's urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

      Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.

      For more information visit: Edward Burtynsky's website

      For event details contact: Ilana Cohen (icohen@gsd.harvard.edu)

        8:00pm - 10:00pm ·   Rm 111
  • November 23, 2009

    • Major Masterplanning in London: Two case studies with widely different constraints

      Camilla Ween, Transport for London, Loeb Fellow 08 will talk about two major projects she is working on, the Upper Lea Valley Masterplan and White City Masterplan.

      Camilla is an architect/planner working on large scale masterplans in London, advising the Mayor on behalf of Transport for London on the implications of land use planning. These are strategic growth areas, often large (up to 300 acres), all with complex constraints in terms of transport infrastructure, physical barriers, existing uses and the challenge of achieving mixed use development, that is sustainable and in conformity with London's spatial development plan, the London Plan.

      Camilla is passionate about making cities that are sustainable, that have high quality public transport infrastructure including pedestrian and cycle networks and have public spaces that are conducive to citizenship and inclusive for all. This means a strong emphasis on high quality urban design, innovative solutions to water and waste management, food production and biodiversity, and new approaches to energy supply.

      She is also engaged in sustainability issues in Ghana. Before joining TfL in 2001 she worked on promoting sustainable transport projects for London, and prior to that she worked for Eurotunnel and the National Trust, after 10 years in her own architectural practice.

      Co-sponsored by HUPO and UPD

      For event details contact: Sally Young (syoung@gsd.harvard.edu)

        12:30pm - 2:00pm ·   Portico 123
  • December 1, 2009

    • HOK/Bill Valentine Lecture in Sustainable Design: Janine Benyus, "Borrowing Nature's Blueprints: Biomimicry and The Art of Well-Adapted Design"

      Biomimicry is a design discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies--new ways of living--that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul. Biomimics around the world are learning to grow food like a prairie, cool buildings like a termite, harness energy like a leaf, create color like a peacock, compute like a cell, and run a business like a redwood forest. These bio-inspired designs are elegant, functional, and life sustaining. Besides helping our species earn a longer stay on the planet, biomimicry has the potential to change the way we view and value non-human nature. It encourages us to view nature not as a source of goods, but as a mentor, a source of wisdom.

      In this special tribute to Bill Valentine, Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, will highlight the Biomimicry Guild's exciting alliance with HOK, which has embraced biomimicry as one of the most important tools used by their designers to create built environments in partnership with nature.

      For more information visit: Biomimicry Guild

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:30pm - 7:30pm ·   Piper Auditorium
  • December 2, 2009

    • Science and Democracy Lecture Series: Raghuram Rajan, "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy"

      Raghuram Rajan is the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

      Panelists
      Suzanne Berger, Political Science, MIT
      Frank Dobbin, Sociology, Harvard
      Niall Ferguson, History, Harvard

      Moderated by
      Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School

      Science and Democracy, a lecture series aimed at exploring both the promised benefits or our era's most salient scientific and technological breakthroughs and the potentially harmful consequences of developments that are inadequately understood, debated, or managed by politicians, lay publics, and policy institutions.

      Organized by the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Graduate School of Design, and Harvard University Center for the Environment

      For more information visit: Science, Technology, and Society events at Harvard University

      For event details contact: Lisa Matthews (lisa_matthews@harvard.edu)

        5:00pm - 7:00pm ·   Piper Auditorium
  • December 4, 2009

    • Platform GSD 09 Exhibition Opening and Book Launch

      A reception to celebrate the Platform GSD 09 exhibition and the launch of the accompanying book!

      About the book
      Platform 02 provides a sampling of the most salient research and design explorations undertaken at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) during the 2008-2009 academic year. Organized thematically, the publication identifies underlying congruencies among studio work, theses, research, lectures, conferences, and writings to unfold some of the many critical ideas and interests currently being explored in the School. Ranging in scope from detailed material fabrication to large-scale territorial and infrastructural strategies, the work spans a broad and diverse set of geographies and scenarios. In documenting this work, the publication archives and disseminates the rich intellectual momentum of the GSD.

      For more information visit: Platform GSD 09 Exhibition
        or: Platform GSD 2 Book

      For event details contact: Brooke King (bking@gsd.harvard.edu)

        6:30pm - 8:00pm ·   Lobby


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