GSD News Archive: January 2007
GSD featured at Progressive Architecture Awards Ceremony |
By Kevin Lynch Architect Rodolfo Machado [co-chair, Department of Urban Planning and Design and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design] likes what he sees of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art. What he sees in his architectural dreams will determine the shape of the museum’s new expansion. That structure will double the size of the state’s second-largest art museum. And it may turn what was considered a crown jewel building on the UW-Madison campus into something far more magnificent. Most of all, Machado says, his vision will be whole, so that the expanded Chazen will cohere harmoniously with the campus and the lakefront. The gifted architect has proved himself repeatedly in designing institutional buildings, and especially museums.
image: University of Utah Art Museum, designed by Machado and Silvetti [copyright 2007, The Capital Times (Madison, WI), January 31, 2007] |
AIA honors Harvard Design Magazine among ten for Distinguished Contributions to Architecture. The award, to be presented in May at the AIA National Convention in San Antonio, recognizes and encourages distinguished achievements of allied professionals, clients, organizations, architect teams, knowledge communities, and others who have had a beneficial influence on or advanced the architecture profession. Harvard Design Magazine, published twice per year for the last decade, focuses on issues of great import to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Under the stewardship of Editor William S. Saunders, GSD’s assistant dean, the magazine publishes substantive book reviews and regular columns of design, places, ideas, culture, education, and practice. With a circulation of 14,000, the magazine is distributed free to aumni, sold in bookstores and on newsstands internationally, and sent to 700 subscribers. The magazine has published essays from leading thinkers in the profession, who include, to name a few, Stan Allen, Peter Blake, Denise Scott Brown, Peter Calthorpe, Robert Campbell, Henry Cobb, Thomas Fisher, Kenneth Frampton, Paul Goldberger, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Rafael Moneo, I.M. Pei, Philippe Starck, and Robert Venturi. |
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A Harvard Design Magazine Forum focusing on the design issues of the ICA was held on January 17th at the new Institute of Contemporary Art building in Boston’s Harbor District. |
Professor in Practice in Architecture Farshid Moussavi’s firm, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), announces 2006/2007 awards, winning competitions, project completions, exhibitions and publications. |
The team of Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston, in association with Milwaukee-based Continuum Architects + Planners, has been chosen by the state of Wisconsin to design the expansion to the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To announce the selection and introduce the architects’ preliminary ideas for the expansion, the Chazen will host a lecture by project designer and GSD Co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design Rodolfo Machado on February 1st. [University of Wisconsin media release, January 2007] |
To Seattle’s eternal credit, its first great building of the 21st century is a library. Designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, GSD Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, and his Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the $165.5 million facility (figures U.S.) stands among those rare structures that actually deserve the attention they have received. [Toronto Star, January 20, 2007] |
2007 AIA Honor Awards Recognize GSD Professor Alex Krieger’s firm for Excellence in Urban Design, GSD alumnus Thom Mayne’s Morphosis for Excellence in Architecture 
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced today the 2007 recipients of the AIA Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition of works that exemplify excellence in architecture, interior architecture, and urban design. Selected from nearly 700 total submissions, 29 recipients will be honored in May at the AIA 2007 National Convention and Design Exposition in San Antonio. Among 11 worthy projects, Thom Mayne’s Morphosis’ Dr. Theodore T. Alexander, Jr. Science Center School in Los Angeles received an Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture. The hybrid campus of primary education and scholastic research serves as a gateway to the greater University of Southern California/Exposition Park and establishes a community foothold in the heart of LA. 
"What set the award-winning urban design projects apart were innovative, clear, and insightful solutions to those problems. The projects and plans bridged the traditional boundaries between architecture, urban design, and planning to address a range of important issues facing many developed communities," said Jury Chair J. Max Bond, Jr., FAIA. Alex Krieger’s firm Chan Krieger Sieniewicz, Inc.’s plan provides a large urban recreation park; a river with restored sinuosity instead of the current artificially-straightened channel; a sensitively-designed road that runs concurrent against the downtown levee and affords park and city vistas; long-term flood protection through levee improvements, parks, and trails; and several hundred acres of community development along the Trinity River Corridor. [AIA Media Release January 2007] |
Jerold Kayden, Co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, was quoted in The New York Times recently regarding the City’s Chief City Planner, Amanda Burden.
(Burden will present a public lecture at the GSD on May 2) Born to the Elite, New York’s Chief City Planner Sweats the Details of the Streets By DIANE CARDWELL "She cares about each building and its details in a way that no other planning director has that I can remember, and I go back a long way," said Jerold S. Kayden, director of the master’s program in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "She’s wise enough to recognize that what I would call small details or granular moves can either enhance or destroy a city. In a funny way she’s the curator of a living, breathing city." [The New York Times, New York Region—January 15, 2007] |
Seven years ago, when GSD Adjunct Professor of Architecture Nader Tehrani and GSD Professor of Architecture Monica Ponce de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular design challenge. [The New York Times, January 18, 2007] |
Office dA, the firm of Professor of Architecture Monica Ponce de Leon and Adjunct Professor of Architecture Nader Tehrani, received an award for "Villa Moda: New Kuwait Sports Shooting Club," a project that expands the existing Club into a community with residential units and public spaces. Their project is also featured in the January issue of Architect magazine. Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies, Hashim Sarkis was honored with a citation for his Bab Tebbaneh School for Working Children and for Women in an impoverished neighborhood in North Tripoli, Lebanon—also featured in Architect magazine. The awards will be presented on January 24 at the Center for Architecture in New York City. The award: GSD alumni Hadrian Predock (MArch ’93) and Jose Castillo (MArch ’95, DDes ’00) served on the P/A Awards jury. P/A awards recognize unbuilt projects that demonstrate overall design excellence and innovation. Over time, they have served as bellwethers of emerging architectural design trends and talents. Architect magazine articles (Adobe pdf): Office dA (Monica Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani) Cover and articles reproduced from Architect magazine: |
The works of several GSD faculty members are featured in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s National Design Triennial 2006 "Design Life Now." The exhibition, which features the work of 87 designers and firms who are leaders, innovators, or emerging figures in the world of design, runs through July 29, 2007. Please see the following faculty exhibits at the Design Life Now website: Preston Scott Cohen Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture Rem Koolhaas Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design Michael Meredith Assistant Professor of Architecture Toshiko Mori Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture Michael Van Valkenburgh Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture |
Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s new GSD Professor in Practice of Architecture Rem Koolhaas has won the competition to design the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s new financial exchange building located in Shenzhen’s new financial district. More than 800 feet high, the building features a floating base that creates a covered urban plaza between the raised platform and the ground that can be used to stage public events or to hang digital banners that stream down financial information. "Lifting the base in the air vastly increases its exposure; in its elevated position, it can ‘broadcast’ the activities of the stock market to the entire city," says Koolhaas, founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). "The essence of the stock market is speculation," he continues. "It is based on capital, not gravity. In the case of Shenzhen’s almost virtual stock market, the role of symbolism exceeds that of the program. It is a building that has to represent the stock market, more than physically accommodate it. It is not a trading arena with offices, but an office with virtual organs that suggest and illustrate the process of the market." [Office for Metropolitan Architecture media release] |
The China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, is the subject of the exhibition OMA in Beijing being held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 26. |
Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor |
 Susan Fainstein, Professor of Urban Planning, presented "Globalization and Urban Politics" on January 5, 2007 at the Conference to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. |
An "Oracle of Aqua" By Christopher Reed "Ours is a society of sensual eunuchs, impotent to the callings of the wildness within and as a result, the pull of that which resides outside," writes Robert Lawrence France in his book Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water. "Transcending our minds, we must recognize that our bodies are the most concrete example of the natural world within our lives." France is adjunct associate professor of landscape ecology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a celebrant of water. Water is in such a bad way, he believes, that it has become impossible to celebrate it as an art form without also worrying about protecting it as a threatened element" [Harvard Magazine, January–February 2007] |
The installation designed by GSD students Kiduck Kim and Christian Staynor, one of two Katrina student exhibits at the Venice Architecture Biennial, is featured in the February 2007 issue of Dwell magazine. See Adobe pdf version of magazine article. © 2007, Dwell magazine. |
 Assistant Professor of Architecture Michael Meredith was recently selected as one of five finalists in the MOMA/P.S. 1 Young Architects competition, now in its eighth year, to design an installation in the P.S. l’s courtyard. The winner will be announced in March. |
Harvard GSD Department of Architecture
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"There is much to like in Joel Kotkin’s well-written polemic against the latest fashion in urban revitalization circles ["Urban Legend," Issue #2]. Dismayed by what he pejoratively deems the "rise of the boutique city," Kotkin criticizes its promoters for focusing on art galleries, coffee-houses, museums, and other "yuppie accoutrements" as vehicles for urban salvation. Although he soft-pedals the origin of this advice, he is really taking aim at George Mason University professor and über-consultant Richard Florida and his best-selling book of four years ago, The Rise of the Creative Class" Jerold Kayden is co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. |
| Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Andrea Leers’ firm, Leers Winzapfel Associates, received the prestigious 2007 AIA Architecture Firm Award based on its proven, consistent ability to accept complex challenges and envision design of elegant distinction. It is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least ten years. |
Architect has grand designs for Chazen 
