GSD News Archive: March 2007
Mayor of London Names Professor Farshid Moussavi and Adjunct Professor Martha Schwartz to “Design for London” Advisory Group
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On San Francisco Skyline, Architecture Worthy of the Art Inside By Roger K. Lewis Occasionally a work of architecture is so compelling, so well crafted, so imaginatively conceived both aesthetically and functionally, that it makes me wish I had designed it. That was my reaction when I recently visited San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to see the new de Young Museum, justifiably described in the museum's brochure as "a landmark building that dramatically integrates art, architecture and nature." [Such is] the de Young Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron and landscape architect Walter Hood. [Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are Arthur Rotch Design Critics in Architecture; Walter Hood recently lectured on his work at the GSD.]
[Washington Post, March 31, 2007] |
An Architect Strikes (Olive) Oil in the Middle East By Lindsey McCormack [01238 magazine, Spring 2007]
Hashim Sarkis has an unusual roster of clients for an architect: fishermen, farmers, child workers. The soft-spoken professor splits his time between the Graduate School of Design, where he directs the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture; his Harvard Square studio; and Lebanon, where he takes on rural design projects in conjunction with local NGOs—and subsidizes this work, “Robin Hood-style,” with more lucrative commissions in Dubai and Cambridge. |
Harvard University Graduate School of Design Visiting Professor Francine Houben of Mecanoo architecten wins Taiwan’s most prestigious design competition Mecanoo architecten based in Delft, The Netherlands, has won the design competition for the new National Performing Arts Center in Kaohsiung. At 100,000 m2 (1.076 million sf), the National Performing Arts Centre is to become the largest theatre complex in Taiwan. The theatre complex will be located in the Wei-Wu-Ying Metropolitan Park and features a concert hall, an opera house, a theater, a black box with a total of 5,800 seats and an open-air theatre suitable for thousands of visitors. The surrounding 65 ha park is part of the design brief. Francine Houben, director of Mecanoo architecten, presented the winning competition design to an international jury of architects, theater specialists and impresarios. Mecanoo’s design was unanimously selected because of the building’s strength in expression, the integration of the complex with the park, efficient logistical planning, advanced theater design and facility techniques and the building design’s response to the subtropical climate of the city of Kaohsiung. The building costs for the theater complex are € 200 million, the budget of the park is not yet known. Building construction will start at the beginning of 2009 and will be completed in 2012.
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The Character of Color: Rem Koolhaas addresses students at the San Francisco Art Institute
[Design Within Reach, Design Notes, March 23, 2007]
image: European flag proposed by Koolhaas |
2007 Notable Projects: College + University Kajima Adjunct Professor in Architecture Mack Scogin and his firm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, are recognized for their work at Ohio State University.
[Architype Review, Vol. 2., No. 2, 2007] |
Koolhaas reveals design for Singapore skyscraperBy Vikki Miller
[Building, March 22, 2007] |
Pyramid-shaped plans for Tate Modern are approved Plans for a high-profile extension to London's Tate Modern gallery have been given the go-ahead. The £215m glass pyramid design, by Swiss architects [and GSD Arthur Rotch Design Critics in Architecture] Herzog & de Meuron, was unanimously granted planning permission by Southwark Council last night despite last-ditch protests by a neighbour.
[The Guardian, UK, March 28, 2007] |
GSD MDesS and Urban Design students are finalists in Urban Land Institute competition The Harvard University Graduate School of Design was one of three universities with student teams selected as the finalists for the fifth annual Urban Land Institute (ULI) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. The finalist teams are charged with the design of a development site in the city of Los Angeles. |
Exhibit explores Zagreb and its transformations By Robert Campbell, Architecture Critic [Boston Globe, March 16, 2007] Zagreb is not a city most of us know, or perhaps have even heard of. But in a fascinating exhibit that's now on the walls of the Harvard Design School, it's worth seeking out. Zagreb proves something we often forget: A city is an organism, as alive as any other ecosystem. The exhibit is called “Project Zagreb.” Curated by Harvard professor Eve Blau, it shows how a little medieval hill town—the kind of village where you climb outdoor stairs to get to the center —grew, over the centuries, down a long slope to a river and eventually across it. |
Salvage Artists, by Paul Goldberger [New Yorker, March 19, 2007]
GSD Design Critic in Architecture John Hong (MArch '96) and his wife and professional partner Jinhee Park (MArch '02) have designed a new home from the Big Dig. |
Open-Source Goes Hammer and Nailby Jessie Scanlon
Cameron Sinclair’s Open Architecture Network aims to connect architects around the globe to struggling communities. Features the Safe® House, designed by students at the GSD in collaboration with the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT, as a dwelling that would resist the force of a tsunami as well as subsequent flooding. [Business Week, March 15, 2007]
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Martha Schwartz : Landscapes of Awareness [Archinect, March 20, 2007] With little care or tact we keep expanding our cities and replacing what was once wilderness with pathetic shrubs in the medians between three car lane avenues. Because we love nature, we put small planters in front of big box stores in the concrete seas that are our suburbs, in what amounts to a desperate effort to humanize the landscape. We love nature so much that we romanticize it, using its image to sell SUVs that in ads, climb idyllic mountains, but in reality are uncritically driven through the increasingly bland (visually and culturally) landscape of sprawl. These are among the arguments laid out to a full Piper Auditorium at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) by landscape architect Martha Schwartz. She concludes that this Quick, Cheap, and (token) Green view of landscape is an increasing problem in the United States and the world. Martha finishes this section of her lecture with a haunting question: What are the long-term effects of a bland landscape on a society and each of its members? |
GSD Kenzo Tange Professor in Architecture David Adjaye named Tastemaker in Architecture
Tastemakers: Architecture, by Lisa Lerer [Forbes, March 14, 2007]
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GSD Aga Khan Research and Teaching Fellow Aziza Chaouni featured as Moroccan Woman of the Year in Moroccan’s leading newspaper; highlights her project in the Medina of Fez |
Transurban exhibition opens in Singapore, will travel through Asia More than 100 local design professionals and researchers recently attended the opening of “Transurban,” an exhibition curated by Assistant Professor of Architecture Thomas Schroepfer and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Christian Werthmann in collaboration with Limin Hee, Assistant Professor of Architecture, National University of Singapore. The exhibition, which opened March 3rd, is being held at the Urban Redevelopment Authority Centre in Singapore where it will run through March 23rd. |
(March 2007)
Machado and Silvetti challenge and benefit a historic seaside community with the Provincetown art association and Museum By John Gendall "To those who have visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, it would be hard to imagine a 20,000-square-foot institutional building rising up in the middle of that quaint, New England seaside town. But such a building now exists, and thanks to a thoughtful design by Machado and Silvetti Associates, it fits right in." |
HafenCity projects in Hamburg, Germany, designed by Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design Rem Koolhaas and Arthur Rotch Design Critics in Architecture Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron highlighted in Der Spiegel (March 1, 2007) |
Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design Rem Koolhaas discusses his design for a new tower in the arts district in Jersey City in recent interviews.
The Hanging Tower of Jersey CityBy Antoinette Martin JERSEY CITY, NJ—[New York Times, March 4, 2007] After a wild development saga involving a dozen legal actions and the hiring of a mega-star architect, the design for a new tower to anchor this city’s arts district emerged last week as, well, kind of wild. The structure designed by Rem Koolhaas is 52 stories tall and holds 1.2 million square feet of mostly residential space. Yet, from most angles, it resembles nothing so much as a small child’s precarious stack of blocks. Looking from Manhattan across the river, the skyscraper presents the startling prospect of a giant barbell, standing on end. Mr. Koolhaas, the Dutch founder of the internationally known Office for Metropolitan Architecture and a professor of urban studies at Harvard, said he took note of the way bare-boned monoliths dominate Jersey City’s modern architecture — “and played with that.” |
Jersey City hopes image will rise with proposed Koolhaas towerBy Janet Frankston Lorin March 4, 2007
JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- With its prime location across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, Jersey City has been drawing new residents and businesses for years with its stunning views of the New York skyline and cheaper rents. But now New Jersey's second largest city is commanding something more than a quick commute to Manhattan: the cachet of an avant-garde 52-story condominium and hotel tower to anchor an arts district, designed by internationally acclaimed architect Rem Koolhaas. |
Harvard Students Explore Belfast Port Potential "Staff and students from the renowned Harvard Graduate School of Design are to look at ways of developing Belfast’s port lands. The delegation is in Belfast at the invitation of the University of Ulster’s School of the Built Environment in partnership with Belfast Harbour Commissioners and Titanic Quarter Ltd. During their visit they will be holding one of the Design School’s eminent “Studios” at which the potential future of the land will be discussed." full article: University of Ulster news release, 2/26/07 GSD 1512: Belfast, Recast Spring 2007 studio option, Richard Sommer. |
Project Zagreb Exhibition Review—Urban design, strategic architecture"When Eve Blau speaks of Milan Lenuci, the city surveyor of Zagreb in the late 19th century, a note of reverence enters her voice. "He's one of our great heroes," she says. Lenuci's finest accomplishment was the "Green Horseshoe," a U-shaped series of parks and promenades surrounding Zagreb's center and providing a refreshing refuge from urban traffic and noise. But what Blau admires even more than the work itself is the way Lenuci managed to bring it into being." Harvard Gazette article by Ken Gewertz, March 1, 2007 |
Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture, to participate in panel discussions.
On March 11, Toshiko Mori will participate in a panel discussion on “Alvar Aalto and Isamo Noguchi: Two Rooms” at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NY. On March 29, she will serve as a panelist discussing “Architectural History Now” at The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. Toshiko Mori was recently a juror for the Young Architects Forum competition organized by the Architectural League of New York. She also was a juror for the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem International Architecture Competition. Mori was interviewed for the recent Vitra Design Museum catalogue, Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living. Mori’s work was also featured in the December 2006 issue of Belle magazine, and was interviewed for the December 2006 issue of At Cooper. |
Just Published: Judging Architectural Value: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (Harvard Design Magazine Reader No. 4) edited by William S. Saunders, Editor of Harvard Design Magazine Paperback, 192 pages. University of Minnesota Press.
Editorial Review By Michael Benedikt
When it comes to determining the relative quality of architecture, who is best equipped to make the distinctions? Is it the public who lives in and among the buildings? The people who commission and pay for the buildings? Art historians? Or architects themselves? These provocative essays take up the questions of what people value in architecture and how changing values influence opinions about it. In the opening essay, Michael Benedikt makes an argument for the role of architects in the delineation of value in architecture. He discusses the differences between icon and canon, a theme threaded through many of the essays. In addition to unexpected analyses of buildings such as Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University, and the work of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Gehry, the collection includes a clear-eyed look at the role of architecture in addressing social problems. |
