Brown Bag Lunch Discussion

Barbara Fields, Executive Director, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and Frank Shea, Executive Director, Olneyville Housing Corporation

Sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

For more information visit: Joint Center for Housing Studies event calendar

For event details contact: Angela Flynn (angela_flynn@harvard.edu)

Urban design is a discipline with a great tradition that has to be refounded: in order to oppose the sprawl and shape new cities that are dense, sustainable, communicative and cheerful. Although still a work in progress, the Campus designed and (partially) built for a pharmaceutical company in Basel is more than just a collection of buildings by internationally reknown architects; it is an example of the application of a controversial theoretical approach to urban design to a complex case study.

Vittorio Lampugnani was born in Rome in 1951 and studied architecture in Rome and in Stuttgart, receiving a doctorate in 1977. Prof. Lampugnani has been a Professor of architecture at Harvard, Frankfurt am Main and Pamplona, and has been Professor for the History of Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich since 1994. Among the most important projects of his Studio di architettura in Milan: office building in Block 109, Berlin (1991-1996); housing group in Maria Lankowitz near Graz (1995-1999); entrance square of the Audi factory in Ingolstadt (1999-2000); urban design planning of Novartis Campus in St.Johann, Basel, (2001 ff.); underground station Mergellina, Naples (2004ff); reshaping of the Donau banks, Regensburg (2004ff); master plan Richti areal, Wallisellen (2007 ff). Prof. Lampugnani's work has been included in numerous scholarly architectural publications and exhibitions.

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

Abstract
Can machines think about themselves? One of the most unique and fascinating aspects of intelligent living systems is their ability to self-reflect: To reconstruct models of their own morphology and of their own behavior, then use those models to adapt to new circumstances. Processes such as self-reflection play a key role in accelerating adaptation by reducing costs of physical trial and error. Similarly, the ability of a machine to observe and reconstruct models of the morphology and behavior of other systems is key to effective cooperation and competition. Despite its importance, however, most current systems can learn and adapt directly but have no second-order ability to reflect. This talk will demonstrate a number of experiments in self reflecting robotic system, and argue that reflective processes are essential in achieving meta-cognitive capacities such as theory-of-mind, consciousness and ultimately self-awareness.

Biography
Hod Lipson is an Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He directs the Computational Synthesis group, which focuses on novel ways for automatic design, fabrication and adaptation of virtual and physical machines. He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his Ph.D. from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. His research focuses primarily on biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insights into biology.

For more information visit: Prof. Lipson's Cornell University faculty profile

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

Marcelo Ebrard, Mayor of Mexico City, will be discussing efforts to make Mexico City more sustainable.

This lecture is sponsored by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Taubman Center for State and Local Government, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard University Center for the Environment

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

Latin GSD 09-10 Lecture Series

Paisajes Emergentes (Emerging Landscapes)-- is a new form of practice based in Medellin Colombia, whose work addresses a wide variety of cross-disciplinary design issues, among them: remediation as it informs program and ecology, energy generation, the potential of water as an unifying element, etc. Edgar, Sebastian & Luis, will go over their current projects and processes, followed by an open dialogue / discussion with students. All disciplines are welcomed!

For more information visit: Paisajes Emergentes website
  or: Blog post

For event details contact: Pedro SantaRivera (psantari@gsd.harvard.edu)

What is the contribution and role of design projects' geographical specificities in shaping an office practice and its methodological approaches? How easily can those methodologies be transferred to different contexts?

Departing from our work in developing countries - where resources are scarce and the demands for basic needs immediate - and desert climates - where water resources are limited- we will delineate our approach which collapses infrastructure, architecture and landscape while attempting to address local social and economic concerns.
I will discuss our praxis model through the analysis of commissioned, speculative and non-profit proposals of various scales as well as research and studio projects.

Aziza Chaouni is currently an assistant professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of architecture landscape and design, where she researches green technologies in arid climates and the rapidly changing Middle Eastern cities. With Professor Liat Margolis, she launched the Out of Water research project. (www.oowproject.com)

Ms. Chaouni is also the principal of Bureau E.A.S.T. Bureau E.A.S.T's Fez River Rehabilitation Project won the 2008 Regional Holcim Gold Award in Sustainable Construction and the 2009 EDRA Best Places Award, the 2009 Holcim Gold Global Award in Sustainable construction, EDRA Best Places Award and was a finalist for the INDEX and SQUAT city competitions. (www.bureaueast.com)

Ms. Chaouni graduated with a MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Chaouni has worked for Hashim Sarkis ALUD, Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and Renzo Piano Building Workshop. She was awarded the Progressive Architecture award in 2007 for her research project, "Hybrid Urban Sutures: Filling the Gaps in the Medina of Fez."She was the Aga Khan Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2006-2007, where she collaborated in the production of a seminar on desert tourism and a studio on the Medina of Fez.

Ms. Chaouni is the director of the research board of DOCO.MO.MO (http://DOCO.MO.MO) Morocco, a chapter of an international organization that seeks the preservation of the modern heritage.

This event is a part of the university-wide Harvard Arab Weekend 2009, for more information on the conference go to: http://www.harvardmena.org

For more information visit: Harvard Arab Weekend at Harvard University

For event details contact: Abdulla Darrat (adarrat@gsd.harvard.edu)

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

The Return of Nature is the first of four Harvard 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)

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)

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)

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)

Check back soon for more information!

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

Brown Bag Lunch Discussion
Evelyn Friedman, Chief of Housing and Director of the Department of Neighborhood Development, City of Boston

Sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

For more information visit: Joint Center for Housing Studies event calendar

For event details contact: Angela Flynn (angela_flynn@harvard.edu)

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)

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)