trays Polling Booth Competition winner champions “open voting” >>

Exhibition Project Zagreb, Prof. Eve Blau receive international recognition >>

Prof. Toshiko Mori lectured extensively this fall >>

Students advocate redesigning asphalt spaces

With the pressure of a three-ton steamroller, GSD students and alumni printed posters on tarpaper, promoting the urgency for change in the design of asphalt spaces, such as parking lots, roads, and driveways. The limited edition prints will be included in an upcoming publication that includes design proposals and asphalt mockups produced by the spring 2008 studio option “Asphalt—The Good, the Bad & the Ugly.” The printing project, which took place on November 8 on Harrison Avenue in Boston’s hip SOWA neighborhood, was led by Paula Meijerink, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and landscape architect at her studio, WANTED.

Image: Kris Lucius, MLA ’08, who participated in the studio option studio Asphalt—The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, rolls paint on the tarpaper poster in advance of steamroller printing. Photo: Anita Kan

Michael Meredith called the “artist’s architect”

Associate Professor of Architecture Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS, a New Haven-based architecture firm, are noted as “an intrepid couple that balances academic pursuits with experimental rigor, creating architecture that attracts an artist’s eye,” in the current issue of Surface magazine, #64.  According to the article, Meredith and Sample are among some of the biggest names in contemporary American architecture who come in pairs—notably Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi and Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio.

“We’re actually engaging the world in less of a cynical manner—rolling up our sleeves and trying to do something, figuring out how to work in and with the world. It’s about being an agent against the status quo, but doing it through practice,” says Meredith.

Joint Center for Housing Studies names new PAB chair; director honored >>

Bruce A. Carbonari, Chairman and CEO of Fortune Brands, Inc., has been named Chair of the Policy Advisory Board at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

LeWitt building opens at MASSMoCA designed by Prof. Leland Cott

The new LeWitt building designed by Bruner/Cott, the architecture firm of Adjunct Professor of Urban Design Leland Cott, merges architecture and art in a permanent exhibit of 100 Sol LeWitt wall drawings. Natural light underscores the crisp elegance of the art, the building design sets fine-scaled wall drawings against a rough-textured mill structure, and a soaring vertical connector links the LeWitt building to the rest of the museum campus—another step in realizing the Bruner/Cott master plan.

More information >>

Image: New LeWitt building at MASSMoCA

Dean Mostafavi among Boston’s most stylish >>

The Boston Globe, 25 Most Stylish Bostonians of 2008

(November 2008)

John Beardsley and Christian Werthmann coauthor Dirty Work article >> (Adobe pdf file)

Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture John Beardsley and Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture Christian Werthmann discuss two different strategies for landscape interventions in informal cities in Argentina and Brazil show the significance of landscape in improving the quality of life in low-income settlements.

[Topos, Vol 64; November 2008]

For more information:  www.topos.de

Prof. Michael Meredith’s firm receives design award

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art awarded MOS, the firm of Associate Professor of Architecture Michael Meredith, first prize in the Flip a Strip national design competition to envision a new future for the strip malls that dominate our landscape. The firm’s award-winning project, Urban Battery, focuses on the Scottsdale strip mall proposal site incorporating “green” features, such as an algae wall and rooftop algae ponds to generate alternative energy, bike paths and walking trails, and a community center. The entries from 35 architectural firms that are on exhibit at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art address the potential for live/work developments, urban farming, social spaces and signature architecture in the no-man’s land of the strip mall.

Urban Battery information >>

Competition information >>

Climate Change and a New World Order panel discussion on Nov. 12 >>

Ulrich Beck, professor of sociology at the University of Munich and British Journal of Society Professor at the London School of Economics, will be the keynote speaker at a panel discussion on Risk Society’s Cosmopolitan Moment: Climate Change and the Opportunity for a New World Order, to be held from 5pm to 7pm on November 12. The lecture and panel discussion, which are co-sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will be held in Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge. The event is part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology and Society.

View event poster >> (Adobe pdf file)

Howard Mack, MArch II ’10, wins design awards

Howard Mack, an MArch II candidate, has received two design awards along with his HOK intern team members in the Student Innovation and the Best School Design (K-12) categories in the Lifescycle Building Challenge. The competition was sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the American Institute of Architects.

The team’s winning structure for both categories, Trans/spot: Transient Awareness Center, is a modular configuration that is assembled in empty lots across the city of Chicago to provide information to local residents. Over time, the structure’s flexibility can adapt to the needs of the community by providing “sustainable” information centers in urban public spaces.
Currently pursuing his second master’s degree in architecture, Howard Mack says his interests are based on any conceptual interpretation of the built environment. This past summer, his experience at Helmuth Obata & Kassabaum, Inc. allowed him to explore these interests. He says his participation in the Lifecycle Building Challenge renewed his awareness of how architecture can be used to enhance future built environments.

More information about Howard Mack and the winning project >>

GSD 08 Platform book launch and exhibition opening >>

Book showcasing student work to be launched November 7, 2008, in conjunction with the "Platform GSD 08: Student Work" exhibition opening of November 3

Galapagos Islands provides student design lab >>

Adjunct Prof. Maryann Thompson noted for sustainable design >>

For the first time that she can remember, clients are requesting “sustainable homes,” says Cambridge architect and Adjunct Professor of Architecture Maryann Thompson, MArch/MLA ’89, who is known for her “green building” principles. “It’s very exciting. Lots of clients who may have been looking to tear things down are instead looking at adaptive re-uses, which is the most targeted kind of recycling you can do.”

 [Harvard Magazine, November-December]

Lecturer Bing Wang, MAUD ’99, DDes ’04, named to two editorial boards

Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design Bing Wang, MAUD ’99, DDes ’04, has been invited to serve on the editorial board for a new monograph on sustainable real estate—the first publication in North America to focus on this subject. Published by the American Real Estate Society, the book will go beyond the normal circle of real estate academics and include commentary by environmental policy experts, geographers, environmental engineers, leading advocates of sustainable practices, as well as researchers from any field who have a concern for social responsibility and sustainable communities. Ms. Wang is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Planning Practice and Theory, co-published by Routledge and Royal Town Planning Institute in London. She is the principal of HyperBina Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the founder of YongYou International Investments Co. in Shanghai.